quantdev

It's very possible we never break the factoring problem. Since we have no properly unified theory of physics (e.g., one that models the observer in QFT), there are outstanding unknowns with quantum computing that may make it so that Shor's algorithm is not practically useful.

We have no good evidence or accepted model for how life started, besides "randomness" in a primordial soup, which is as good as "no idea". As such, it seems like a reasonable assumption to explore.

Only technology can save us from global warming and only private enterprises like Tesla and others can develop and - more importantly - cheaply scale that technology. There are billions of Chinese and Indians who will become the equivalent of American middle class in the coming decade and no amount of conservation or carbon tax is going to prevent the acceleration of global temperatures that would cause.

Yes, you're right. I should have said, there's no better choice of symbols that will remove the huge set of prerequisites you need to first understand. There isn't as large of a tower of abstractions to understand most codebases.

I'm both a programmer and a mathematician. Mathematics is written in English (or another human language) plus added symbols. The symbols are what we refer to as the notation. It's not comparable to programming language. Here the words are equal to the symbols.

Also, no better notation could help you understand most modern mathematics. There's no better choice of symbols or names that will help you understand Galois theory. You simply need to understand high-school algebra, then group theory, then Galois theory.

The primary transmission route in inhalation in close proximity to an infected person. Yes, it can persist on surfaces, but this hand-washing meme is mostly a result of (1) it costs nothing and may help, so we should try and (2) masks are supply limited and the healthcare industry doesn't have enough. In reality, if we had an abundance of masks, masks would be more important than hand washing. As it stands, we reserve them for HC workers and infected persons. The point being, subways are worse.

What does hardware 1 and AP1 have to do with the latest hardware and autopilot?

The system is absolutely AI based today. There is no hardcoding like this. Hardware 3 in Tesla cars is an ASIC meant to run neural nets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Hardware_3). Why are you so confidently stating things you don't know about?

Future profitability is how equities are priced. Ford is expected to not be (very) profitable while Tesla is. Number of units sold is irrelevant.

Leetcode premium doesn't mean you'll see the problem. I suspect the probability of that is low, given these problems are constantly changing (there's a banned problem list at Google) and the interviewer pool is as well.

I 100% would be able to solve this problem without seeing it before. Yes, this is because I've practiced a lot of algorithm problems (and I enjoy them, frankly).

Yes, this is hackable, but relying on resumes like every other industry (which is implicitly relying on hoop-jumping and college prestige and GPA) is a much worse form of hackable. This levels the playing field and is a signal for (1) how smart someone is and (2) how much they prepared for the interview, both of which are weakly related to the job. Further, people who excel at algorithm are very unlikely to be bad at the kind of work at big tech.

It's not perfect, but finding something better at scale is hard.

Some analyst at Morgan Stanley made up that $100B number. It has ZERO meaning and no one should take it seriously. The market cap of a company is what investors are willing to pay for it. Given that Alphabet wholly owns Waymo, there is no way the market is implicitly valuing Waymo at $100B given the present value of Google's advertising business and Alphabet's market cap.

So what? Products improve. This one will too. Imagine seeing an ad on Youtube and immediately being able to play the game on your chromebook. I don't know that's what is going to happen and it can't work today, but maybe in a few years.

As someone concerned about climate change and very bullish on alternative energy, I still think this is a slippery slope. Google shouldn't choose who can use its services based on politics. GCP/Search/Maps should serve all legal businesses. This is both a moral (not legal) position and risk-averse one (who knows what employees will want to censor in 10 years).

VW has $44b in cash and $160b in debt.

Tesla has over $5Bn in cash and positive operating cash flow. You can argue about $TSLA the equity's valuation, but whether it survives long-term is no more questionable than whether VW survives.

There is absolutely no way beef spikes insulin as much as rice does. Beef has zero carbohydrates and while some protein does convert to glucose, it is a slow process and thus the insulin response will still be much less than if one consumed the equivalent of carbohydrate in rice. This is further slowed by digesting the fat in the beef.

""Between 50–60% of protein becomes glucose and enters the bloodstream about 3–4 hours after eaten." Perhaps 50–60% of protein goes through the process of gluconeogenesis in the liver, but virtually none of this glucose enters into the general circulation."

http://journal.diabetes.org/diabetesspectrum/00v13n3/pg132.h...

Agreed. I don't want to see hosts challenging their guests' ideas. I appreciate Sean Carrol's physics podcasts for exactly the same reason: he doesn't always agree with his guest's interpretation of quantum mechanics or understanding of consciousness, but he does not argue with them - he helps them present their best case.

If you want to see guests arguing with their hosts, well that's a form of entertainment you can get on cable.

Why shouldn't we hear what nationalists have to say? Who gets to decide what is a conspiracy theory? They're not all as simply false as flat earth. Keto in the low-fat 90s would have been a conspiracy theory and a culture of censorship would have killed it.

We need many groups of people believing different things and civilly arguing for what's correct. We don't need de-platforming or cancelling - that can only lead to groupthink and groupthink is incredibly dangerous: see the housing crisis or the Nazis.

Hacker News has become tribal and politicized, much like many other parts of the internet.

>>If we believed that Amazon is actually creating 25,000 NEW jobs, as well as jobs that otherwise would not exist, it seems pretty reasonable to say that the state and city come out ahead net-net.

From NYC's perspective, many of these probably will be new jobs, because many knowledge workers who wouldn't otherwise will move to NYC because of an Amazon job.

Further, $109k/yr/employee is way too low for NYC Amazon engineers; this is likely ignoring the equity grant which is taxed as ordinary income. The average will skew much higher. It seems that each new employee will very easily generate over $6100/year in state+local tax revenue.

Further there are synergies and network effects from NYC having more tech jobs and these nth-order effects will also generate tax revenue.

You can argue that this charade wasn't good for America, but it certainly was good for NYC.

I don't think the hedonic treadmill or that link has anything to do with your statement "the average person spends almost exactly as they make as income rises." The hedonic treadmill says that happiness is eventually independent of income and savings. So, eventually, whether someone makes $1mm/year, saves none of it, makes $1mm/year, saves $500k, or makes $30k/year, saves none of it, s/he'll have the same happiness.

Also, your statement is false. The average higher-income person saves both more money on an absolute basis ($ amount) and on a percent-of-his/her-income basis.

I'm neither a participant nor scientist in the study, so I don't see what point I'm missing. Actually even for both those groups, making predictions is fine, really, so long as the study is properly blinded.

From anecdotes, the correlation studies, and my personal experience, I believe the results will be positive. If the results show otherwise, I'll accept it and try to understand why I was wrong.

Incredible news. I cannot wait for this study. I expect positive results for both the supplements. What's your prediction?

Actually, it's not clear if boom and busts are "a thing" in free markets. We've had far worse booms and busts, and at a higher pace, ever since the Federal Reserve was created and has artificially modified the interest rate.

The Fed lowers the interest rate because they have an incentive for the economy to perform well, because they want to look good (Alan Greenspan admitted he kept interest rates lower longer than he thought necessary because he wanted to retire on a high economy). This makes money cheap, so to speak, which creates incentive for everyone to borrow. Individually, this makes sense, but together, this ends in 2009-style.

On top of that, many monopolies are created via regulations and laws.

The fact that you're not even able to discuss these concepts or to realize that economists are incentivized to believe exactly the opposite of what I've said, because they financially benefit as central planners, mean that you are anti-intellectual, not the OP.

Who cares who created it? The calculation is laid out and unless you have an error to present, you're criticism is invalid.

It looks correct to me and is obviously more featured than the NYTs calculator which only allows you to pick ranges and subsets.

Are both of you incorrectly taking into account payroll taxes or AMT or state and local? It seems accurate to me.

Surprised to see such a big tax decrease (~14%) even though my wife and I live in Manhattan and our state and local taxes are about ~10% effective.

The loss of the state and local deductions is more than made up for by the drop in the marginal rates, apparently.

Now, if we had other deductions (e.g., student loan, mortgage interest and tax, medical, etc.), I suspect we'd lose out here.

I'm sure this is an unpopular opinion on HN, so let me say I don't believe we deserve such a large tax cut, but I'm glad to see this plan is not incentivizing debt or artificially inflating home prices as much as the current one.

Your reasoning is an example of failing to understand the difference between a random variable and an exposure to a random variable.

Experts are almost always right when the outcome is irrelevant. Economists can accurately predict next year's GDP growth most of time, sure. Except that time they're all somehow wrong at the same time and it's a massive miss and we enter a recession. This is really the only time we care about them being right ("Housing can't be in a bubble").

Until economists are financially harmed or benefited in proportion to how bad or good their predictions are, they won't understand this idea either.

It's absolutely easy to do. The fact that it's probabilistic doesn't by default make it hard, and in fact, over long time frames, it's much easier to forecasts (expected) costs and profit for BTC miners than in most businesses (say, e.g., Walmart).

Miners have continuous liabilities in USD and so most only hold Bitcoins as long as as is necessary by the protocol (100 blocks). Further, expected fees are easy to estimate over medium-to-long time frames. I basically disagree with everything you've said here and below.