tlb

The best way to invest ethically is to do it yourself. When you give your money to a VC firm to do it, they end up following bogus rules like ESG.

When I invest, it's always a mix of wanting the company's product to exist in the world and wanting to make money. Making money lets you invest in future things you want to exist in the world, so it's at least a good instrumental goal. But more importantly, companies that don't make money usually don't grow. So the social impact of investing in unsuccessful companies is usually small. The goals are mostly aligned as long as the product is something you want to exist.

Health effects of particulates are approximately linear. So the more particulates the more mortality. There's no threshold below which people are healthy and above which they're sick.

It's actually slightly sub-linear, meaning that an increase for one group and an equal decrease for another group produces slightly less total mortality. See https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9109601/#gh2329-bib... for some numerically fitted curves (search for GEMM).

Really, "I call myself John". The "m'" (or "me" if the verb doesn't start with a vowel) is the first person reflexive.

All these claims are like "programming is impossible because I typed in a program and it had a bug". Yes, everyone's first attempt at a reward function is hackable. So you have to tighten up the reward function to exclude solutions you don't want.

No, air isn't clean by default. All air has particulates in it at various levels. There are natural particulates like forest fire smoke, blowing dust, and volcano emissions. And there are man-made particulates, dating back to the invention of fire but getting much worse with coal. All are harmful to some extent.

If you do something that causes air in one place to get 1 ppm dirtier and air in another place to get 1 ppm cleaner, and the populations are the same, the net impact on health cancels out.

The purpose of many laws is to require documentation without imposing any new limits on what the government can do.

In the Levant and Europe, they ground up wheat to make flour and baked it into bread. You can eat raw wheat but it's a lot of work.

In the Americas they ground up corn instead. In Africa, millet.

In New Guinea they still harvest sago palms. They chop up the insides, extract the starch through several washing cycles, and make a sort of pancake out of it. The palm itself is inedible. Harvesting a palm takes several people all day. In the end they have a portable, storable, easily digestible food.

Around the Pacific, taro has to be cooked and mashed before eating. It's toxic if you don't cook it and discard the water. A lot of greens need to be cooked too due to calcium oxalate.

But is it comfortable to talk that way for hours? Can you shout and whisper and sing that way? If not, people would've gradually shifted to easier sounds.

There are lots of places you can still hunt (or trap) and gather. The actual problem most people would face is (a) they're not very good at it and (b) it's extremely tedious.

Hmmm, what's the algorithm to extract 101 and not 10101 or 1010103 as the next prime? I suppose you can remember how many digits were in the last prime and only allow the same or 1 more, which should be unambiguous. Though it relies on the unproven conjecture that there are no very long runs (an entire order of magnitude!) with no primes.

250000 liters of FLiBe contains 44 tons of beryllium, and the current annual production is 220 tons, so it's possible but not cheap.

I moved to the English countryside recently (early 50s). Regardless of what the media finds to freak out about, it's lovely and quiet and the people are nice.

A clog doesn't quality as something going terribly wrong. Empirically, my plumbing costs are $300 over 10 years. By comparison, rats are actually a big problem in the deep wooded suburbs. We spend a lot more on exterminators, rat traps, poison, and mesh covers to keep them out of the house. Rats smell bad, scare the girls, attack the chickens, spread garbage around the pickup area, spread fleas to the dogs, and are a nontrivial vector for serious human diseases.

So given that rats are a bigger problem than clogs under my current policy of scraping plates down the disposer, I should probably do it even more.

Rats only live a few years, so they're not a good model for long-term effects. For instance, if microplastic exposure over 60 years causes dementia, it won't affect rats.

I've been doing it for many years in my house with no problem. Are you claiming that someday something will go terribly wrong and I'll regret it?

You can make systems less chaotic with damping, but that's not always good. A damped 3-body problem (orbiting planets under gravity) results in the planets losing momentum until they all smash together. If you have an active control system like for controlling a robot arm, adding damping in the wrong place can make oscillations worse.

We learned something pretty big and surprising from each new generation of LLM, for a small fraction of the time and cost of a new particle accelerator or space telescope. Compared to other big science projects, they're giving pretty good bang for the buck.

I've designed PCBs using connectors with multiple parallel wires to carry high currents. It's hard to do, and very easy to mess up during later PCB changes. You have to match trace resistances from each pin to the destination. The resistance in the traces is probably higher than the resistance in the wires, so the wires don't help balance the current much.

It's easy to mess up during minor PCB changes because the netlist doesn't capture the important bit. An autorouter would happily connect the pins of the connector together and cause uneven current sharing.

Most states have sales tax added on top of the listed price so items being round numbers don't cause the total to be a round number.

I've done this for arrays in JSON files, so that git merge will merge two changes that append to the list without a conflict.

I think the right answer is to fix the merge algorithm to handle some common cases where an inserted line logically includes the delimiter at the end of the previous line.

There'll be demand for both kinds of models, imaginative and dependable.

See advice at https://www.ycombinator.com/library/carousel/Finding%20a%20C...

And a matching service at https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching

It's profitable for Amazon and eBay to have reliable reviews and fewer dissatisfied customers.

HN's purpose is about gratifying intellectual curiosity (see Guidelines link in footer.) I don't see anything intellectually interesting here, and the comments in previous submissions suggest that nobody else has anything interesting to say about it either.

There are plenty of other online forums for complaining about the character of people in politics.

I recommend The Man in the Thick Lead Suit by Daniel Lang (1954). About the US atomic program, written before people got all uptight about radiation.

It might not be ironclad, but the ease with which federal workers can fiddle with data they're hosting themselves vs. fiddling with data in Harvard's library is a pretty big difference. And if it ever came to demands for censorship, it wouldn't be Harvard Library's first rodeo.

That's true at a point in time, but bad guys start out as clueless noobs with poor opsec. The Silk Road guy, for example, was identified by forum posts he made before becoming a drug lord. The sort of people who become radicalized through online videos aren't using strong crypto until after they've committed to becoming terrorists. So a database of texts going back several years is quite useful in catching actual bad guys.

Which is not to say I approve of more surveillance. Just that surveillance of convenient modes of communication (iMessage) is useful to serious crime fighting.

I wrote a lot of 6502 assembly once, and you spend a lot of time dealing with the 8-bittedness of the architecture. Multiplying two 16 bit numbers is a whole blob of code. That doesn't seem useful for new programmers to struggle with.

The early ARM ISAs are good, as you say.

Not if the company had up-to-date audited financials, no. You'd start with those.

The problem is agencies that haven't been audited in a decade. The agencies literally don't report how much money they get, their current balances, or where it goes.

Here's the DOD proudly announcing that they now have clean audits for 11 of their 28 departments: https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/39.... Surely nothing bad is happening in the other 17.

It's shocking how many billions of spending are completely unaudited. Official gov't auditors have tried for years, but the target agencies stall and stall. You have to assume there is some malfeasance there.

Doing an audit starting with the treasury department seems like the right first step. Every outflow of money ultimately has to start there. It's the root node of the Sankey diagram. Then you follow the money outwards from there.