Hacker News Reader

typon Bilingualism affords no general cognitive advantages: Study

One thing I find interesting about being multilingual is you can 'unlock' your different personalities and disrupt mental inertia a bit when speaking another language. It's like having one part of the brain take a break while activating other parts. But I also feel awkward speaking a different language in front of close friends when you are so used to speaking the 'default' language with them. It feels like you are exposing your other personality.

typon Michigan could provide $300M to reopen nuclear power plant

It's not like France would have excessive 'base load' nuclear generation in the first place. The base load power plants are not designed to respond to demands or serve as reserved capacity.

typon There’s no such thing as affordable housing

Singapore did it by purchasing the land incrementally from private owners. It's not like they confiscated it with coercive authoritarian force.

typon Ccache – a fast C/C++ compiler cache

The shared-state cache in the Yocto project is also interesting. It seems the sstate cache is language agnostic.

typon Tax the Land

The effect of income taxes is not simply to disincentivize work like one would imagine. Top talents who are able to afford the cost choose their tax residence due to income tax. Even in the US, it would influence people's career decisions about where to live/work. Businesses also take the taxes into account when choosing countries/states to invest or build facilities.

typon TSMC R&D chief: There’s light at the end of the chip shortage

You don't really need it. The semiconductor industry relies on equipment and materials from the global supply chain, in particular, the suppliers from Europe, Japan and the US. It's a team game. If the democratic world stopped doing business with TSMC (i.e., a sanction), it would have barely any chance to survive, let alone maintaining the position as an industry leader.

typon Google Search Is Dying

I've changed my default search engine to Bing for a while. Before I did that, I did compare the results with Google search and found that the clickbait websites that keep pissing me off are shown only by Google search. Those content farm sites have been on Google search as the top results for years to the extent I think it literally cancels any advantage Google search provides.

typon Open-Sourcing our Firmware

Hardware defects are often worked around by firmware. It can be things like adjusting current drive or lowering the clocks conditionally to mitigate EMI. It can even check the serial numbers of the hardware to determine what to do for the pieces with inferior quality in order to pass QA and increase yields. If customers get to find out what kind of defects or which batches are inferior, that would imply costly consequences for business.

typon Direct conversion of CO2 to solid carbon by Gallium-based liquid metals

>Plants are much better suited to capturing CO2

I do wonder if it would be much cheaper to capture CO2 by investing technology and capital into 'building' forests. What if we can irrigate Sahara and cultivate some fast-growing plants like bamboos there? Maybe that has ecological consequences but it doesn't seem to be much different than the agricultural land expansion that has happened in rainforests in the first place.

typon Balanced budget fiscal stimulus: The case for shifting taxs onto land

Land’s share in economies’ nonfinancial assets equals between 40% and 60%, and in the US currently equals over 50%. This constitutes a very large base for a non-distortionary tax. This column suggests that a 5-percentage point or larger increase in the tax rate on the value of US land, excluding buildings and equipment situated on the land, balanced by decreases in the tax rates on incomes from labour and from buildings and equipment (and in the limit by their complete elimination), would increase output by 15% to 25%.

typon World food prices reach new peak since July 2011

I assume that inflation (CPI) can be reflected by the increase of money supply only when people can't find a way to transfer the money to somewhere inflation-proof and can only spend it on consumer goods. That's absolutely not the case in modern days. Look at the housing price, that's where the money's gone.

typon What caused all the supply chain bottlenecks?

I thought maximizing ROE is rather 'old-school' nowadays.

Most businesses I know tend to strive for growing market share and revenue. They are even willing to run the business in the red for that.

typon Tim Sweeney: Tax bill would likely end founder control of independent companies

The point is there has to be someone to make the final decisions, be they talented or not. You could vote on everything, but I don't think that would be efficient or even make sense for all circumstances.

typon Liberalizing Land Use Regulations: The Case of Houston (2020)

Exemption of principal residence isn't a bad thing for LVT. It still disincentivizes people from treating housing as a store of wealth, which is literally the root of all evils about various social/economic issues.

The cost of housing would have to infinitely keep growing if we expect every generation of homeowners are guaranteed a lucrative ROI when they retire. I don't understand how that would be sustainable other than a "Après moi, le déluge" mindset expecting the later generations to pay the bill (yeah, literally our pensions included). This problem is even compounded when considering the consequence of the HGT (the Henry George Theorem).

I am already getting a bit struggling to afford a home that is not as good my parents' even though I have a much higher-paying job. But I can't imagine how my children are going to afford it without my financial aid or they have to move to somewhere cheaper.

That said, I somehow agree with you regarding the political aspect, which probably needs a profound wisdom to figure it out.

typon What If OpenDocument Used SQLite? (2014)

Not sure if this is qualified: https://gitlab.com/cznic/sqlite

It seems to be a Sqlite (compatible) implementation written in Go.

typon A former Uber engineer's disaster story

I’m afraid it could easily be the biggest mistake made by Apple over the last decade. The bloatedness and slow build time just aren't justified by the shiny, convenient language features.

typon Best aspects of C

These zero-cost-abstraction languages don't pay much attention to binary code size. They can't compete with C in that regard. For the low-cost, high-volume embedded devices, code size relates to the unit cost, and thus the profit margin.

typon Intel's disruption is now complete

I agree with you. But I think it's a "can't-see-the-forest-for-the-tree symptom" that is possibly due to the typical HN demographics. It has been a decade or longer that the US relies on China manufacturing for industrial infrastructure that is as (or even more) critical as wafers. It doesn't help fix the problem by simply singling out semiconductors and keeping every other industry locked in China as-is.

typon San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

I am not sure what you mean by "doesn't function as a traction tax". It does create the same incentive for hoarding. I don't see any advantage of it compared with LVT.

typon San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

A transaction tax does not reduce the demand. It reduces the quantity of transactions that matches the demand and supply. That means it adds friction to the reallocation of resources for more efficient use. It literally encourages hoarding. That is even worse than speculation.

typon San Francisco voters approve taxes on highly paid CEOs, big businesses

No, they are different.

Unlike LVT, an appreciation tax is a transaction tax, which can be shifted to the purchasers.

typon Banks, QE, and Money-Printing

Housing_price = rent * reciprocal_of_interest_rate

typon Mark Zuckerberg Stoked Washington’s Fears About TikTok

> the sole reason is that everybody who works for the Chinese government owns an iPhone.

Not only that, a large portion of iPhones are manufactured in China, which sustains enormous supply chains and jobs there.

typon TikTok to challenge U.S. order banning transactions with the video app

When you respond to the guys who follow nasty strategies with niceness, you are literally rewarding the bad behaviors. If being cooperative wouldn't get much differences than being exploitative, then the nice guys will vanish and only the bad guys will remain. A reciprocal strategy is necessary and beneficial long-term for the world IMO.

The well-known book The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins has an interesting chapter titled Nice Guys Finish First giving a good illustration relevant to this idea.

typon What harm do minimum wages do?

> First of all a rational actor will not intentionally pay a worker the value of their production; you get no profit.

The sum of the production of workers is not equal to the production of a business.

Otherwise, if a business increases revenues significantly by simply replacing its CEO, does it mean that the CEO contributes to the increased revenue all alone?

typon TSMC plans to halt chip supplies to Huawei in 2 months

>bloodlines and ancestry

This is a kind of value and ideology as well, just a unsophisticated and primitive one.

typon Why Is This Website Port Scanning Me?

Strictly speaking, it is more like the shell of the distributed operating system.

typon TSMC Announces Intention to Build and Operate Advanced Semiconductor Fab in U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimea#Politics

Not sure how accurate it is though.

typon I can't keep up with idiomatic Rust

It's been mentioned from time to time that Go is a successor of C. As I recently had a look into the Pascal/Oberon family. It looks that Go is no less influenced by Oberon than C. The CSP paradigm likely comes from Rob Pike's previous works. And the syntactical elements, such as the operators and punctuations, also follow the C tradition. But the overall program structure (including the approach to OOP and probably the 'evolving-by-reduction-rather-than-addition' philosophy) makes it seem closer to the Oberon linage.

typon What If Andrew Yang Was Right?

That has to assume that most people would choose lower-paying jobs if the extra income presents. But I don't think it is necessarily true. It is also unlikely that people would right away leave their current job if rents are on the rise, at least not until the net gain gets surpassed by the alternatives. The extra income probably gives the tenants more 'tolerance' to the rent increase and that is simply how subsidies interact with market.