sethev

The thing that stands out in Buffett's letters (including this one), is his commitment to clearly communicating the true health of the company in the most accurate way possible. That's missing in a lot of corporate communication, which try to spin results or invent creative metrics that make the company look better.

He always shares GAAP as well but will usually point out where he thinks it not useful.

It’s worse than nothing. People who know their message isn’t secure can adjust what they say accordingly.

I was more curious on why they thought that would increase availability. It didn't seem like it would be constructive to speculate about why they chose that.

AWS doesn't guarantee that failures within an AZ are independent of each other, so it's not clear how you would estimate what availability you'd gain with this. Losing everything in an AZ + 1 instance sounds like a very unusual and specific scenario to design for.

Do you think you're actually gaining availability with an AZ + 1 setup?

Didn't prevent it is closer to my recollection. My first job was on a system that used this idea pretty heavily - what a nightmare! We only got that code stabilized once we removed any sharing (and later removed Access completely).

Investment seems like the right word to me. It wasn't fundraising for the company, though. It was the owners selling a portion of it to hedge the risk that it might fail (according to the link article). That implies to me that they kept the money for themselves rather than re-investing it in the business, at least at the time.

That's fair - last time i used C++ in earnest was around 2007. Unless they broke compatibility, it would still be opt-in, though, right? Nice thing about Rust is that the resource management approach is built-in and enforced by default.

I like the fact that Rust has a set of libraries (crates and the standard library) that provide a lot of the features that you end up re-inventing if you stick with C. Even C++ is pretty fractured in this regard.

A lot of why this is hard in C/C++ is memory management. Even if you had a package manager it would be hard to compose libraries together unless they were designed together (like boost for C++).

This supports the case the article was making. Clearly the type system in Haskell doesn't prevent it from handling arbitrary data - it's hard to imagine a program more open to change in the input data than a Lisp interpreter.

You seem to have a set of rules that you think code in a statically typed language has to follow in addition to the type constraints in order for you to consider it sufficiently 'typed'.

You picked a strange example since so many Lisps were implemented in statically typed languages.

Here's one in C (less than 200 lines): https://carld.github.io/2017/06/20/lisp-in-less-than-200-lin...

Here's one in Haskell: https://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp-in-haskell.html

You know that but your compiler doesn't (generally speaking).

I thought the article was good and addressed a real point of confusion, as evidenced by the two included comments (from Reddit and HN). You can consume arbitrary data using a program written in a statically typed or dynamically typed language. Whether it's decoupled from changes in the data depends on how the code is written and the data model, which have nothing to do with static vs dynamic typing.

To me the stronger argument is that the boundary between programs is dynamically typed (interpreted and checked at runtime). This is true in the statically typed example as well - the JSON is interpreted and checked at runtime, not at compile time. There's nothing your compiler can prove in advance about what's in the JSON that you'll receive at runtime.

If systems that extend beyond a single program require dynamic typing, doesn't it make sense to invest more in ways to do dynamic typing better?

You should read the article you linked. "Liebeck suffered permanent disfigurement after the incident and was partially disabled for two years." The fact that people remember "crazy lady didn't know coffee was hot" is due to corporate PR. It worked on the public but not on the jury who heard the facts directly.

Jepsen has done a good job of showing that a lot of systems that focused on the hard part failed to do the "easy" part.

Thought experiment is the right term for it. It applies equally to a brain if you think that the chemical and electrical processes in the brain are identical to understanding. Searle believes that consciousness is a fundamental fact.

The point is he could have retained ownership of Vanguard itself.

Sure, it's similar (no coincidence, as you point out). Most people in the US don't directly participate in the ACA marketplace. For all the talk about freedom of choice, i'd venture that the majority of Americans have no real choice in what insurance they'll get (apart from their freedom to switch jobs or pay a higher price on the exchange by forfeiting their employer's contribution).

We also have a significant population (~15%) on a public system that has an influence on prices that everyone pays but no authority to negotiate drug prices.

I don't think that any one of these differences is an explanation for the gap between ~11% of GDP and ~17% but there are enough of them that it's hard for me to decide public vs private is orthogonal.

In Switzerland, the basic insurance plan is defined by the government and everybody is required to participate in at least that plan. Everybody has the same deductible and out of pocket maximum and premiums (as paid by individuals) are capped at 8% of income.

If you don't sign up the penalties can actually be higher than premiums and if you persist in not getting insurance the government will sign you up and allow the insurance company to sue you for any unpaid premiums.

This system is nothing like what "private" means in the US. This would be called communism in our current political discourse.

Obligatory link to Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

I don't know the specifics of the Go standards but semantic versioning doesn't add anything if you don't break your consumers.

The founder and largest individual shareholder of a corporation announcing that they're considering taking the company private is definitely news.

The creator of sonic pi gave a keynote talk at my company's dev conference last month. He was pretty clear that it was originally created to help teach children programming. It does have other audiences now though.

He mentioned that he tried starting with simple games like you suggest but that kids have unrealistic expectations of what they'll be able to do and it leads to disappointment. They can imagine a commercial quality game quite easily but have no hope of creating one. But with music they're excited to be able to make any sound at all and don't expect to be able to create a film score.

I doubt that. I live in Kansas City and the public shock was pretty much immediate - even before it was reported who it was. There's no way that ride was staying open.

Also, the park is still operating just not that ride.

I think one of the biggest problems is having to start (almost) from scratch. You can run pretty much any software you want in a container - even if you just have the binary. With a unikernel, you'd have to write the software specifically for the unikernel.

The big problems in social media are already decentralized. Tribalism (also termed as filter bubbles), the spread of false information, and outrage as a mechanism of virality all originate with people in a distributed fashion.

Facebook selling ads based on demographics is centralized but it seems to me like a small part of what's messed up about social networks.

Nobody’s claiming that money laundering somehow modifies the money itself.

Seems an odd question. Do have some reason to think it was speeding?

It's the indefinite funding of a fixed obligation that seems weird to me. If my manager said, "I'm sorry I can't pay your $5000 bonus next year because we don't have $111,000 set aside in a fund earning 4.5% in perpetuity" i'd be a lot more upset. Honestly there's probably something about the accounting that I don't understand.

It seems weird to insist that all future obligations have to be funded with money that's set aside now. To give a small example, it would sound crazy if someone said people had to set aside a fund whose interest could pay all the cost of raising a child in advance.

I'd say Dennett's claim is that Chinese Room isn't an argument at all. The reason it has a guy in the room is because we're used to people understanding language. It applies just as well to components of the brain, like neurons (as currently understood - i.e. primarily mechanistic). There's no "guy" sitting in your brain who understands English. In fact I think a lot of people miss that Searle's core claim is that there's something fundamental about consciousness in the same way that there's something fundamental about the foundations of physics. Searle is arguing against the idea that neurons, individually or collectively, can be conscious.