valenciarose

The quietly is less about communication with the public than it is communication with the non-profits about the gifts. No weeks/months-long crafting of the gift announcement message. No extended negotiation about how the gift is going to be used. Hint, right now every non-profit is hurting for unrestricted genop money.

It's incredibly refreshing.

Securities lending, OTC Swaps, and highly favorable margin rates (although the underlying economics of this are actually driven by the securites lending business)

It is safe for all but the shortest-term investors to ignore the ramblings of chartists. Intel has serious challenges in several markets, all of which are understandable without squinting at day-to-day price fluctuations.

It’s a necessary complexity, particularly given that Mozilla predates the existence of Benefit Corporations by a dozen years. As a purely non-profit corporation, having most of your revenue come from business income is a big problem. As a for-profit, director’s fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders can get in the way of pursuing a public good mission. And, collaboration with for profit orgs gets a little less regulatory scrutiny if a non-profit is in control.

This is a much more perceptive set of comments than I originally understood them to be. Thank you.

You assume all bytes are eight bits, but that hasn’t always been the case. Machines with variable byte sizes were relatively common in the 70s and early 80s. This is why so many RFCs use the word octet instead of byte.

The artificial resource constraints created by IPv4 are a substantial barrier to entry. Prediction: we’re going to see a court case that forces a mandatory retirement of IPv4 sometime in the next 15 years.

The word Modern absolutely does not mean new, recent, or contemporary in the context of design (or really in reference to any visual presentation). The design of Walkman was innovative and new when it came out, but at no point in time did it qualify as Modern.

Modernism, as applied to the design of tools and other useful objects, was codified by Dieter Rams half a century ago. The recent resurgence of Modernism as applied to computer software and hardware is not the result of inevitable progress. It’s the result of Steve Jobs deliberately choosing Modernism in the early 90s (although this wasn’t apparent in products until his return).

https://ifworlddesignguide.com/design-specials/dieter-rams-1...

Aesthetic evolution is a fact in user interfaces as much as it is in other functional objects like automobiles, furniture, and architecture. Priorities in trade-offs between things like information density and rapid visual navigation are also subject to this kind of change. Part of that evolution is influenced by technical context, such as what has become possible or practical that wasn’t before. Part of that evolution is influenced by cultural context, including both art and the aesthetics of physical objects (or software). Successful UI in Japan is strikingly different than it is elsewhere, even allowing for differences in language.

One of the things that all user interfaces do is marshal user attention, and newness or freshness is one tool for that. That can be used to advantage or disadvantage users, but it is a constant pressure for change in user interfaces.

The term Modern in user interfaces tends to translate as “inspired by the Functionalist school of Industrial Design, particularly as exemplified by Dieter Rams at Braun and Apple’s Industrial Design team under Jonny Ive”. There’s functional value to freshness, so the definition isn’t static, but the term Modern means something other than new or contemporary.

It isn’t a waste of time for producers and critics (in the neutral sense) of user interfaces to learn some art history, architectural history, and history of Industrial Design.

All of my friends who work in crypto loathe PGP. None of them mention the implementation as their primary area of concern. Some of them mention the implementation as an unsurprising sequela to the kitchen sink of “capabilities” PGP attempts to cover. It has, by design, a nearly fractal surface area for users to compromise their security and for developers to make subtle implementation errors.

This isn’t an attempt to estimate a typical bill for an asymptomatic individual. It’s an attempt to set an expected value for the costs that will eventually be incurred across the population of asymptomatic patients. They are using a mean to describe how costs will scale with the size of that population (asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 positive) and NOT as a way to describe the typical costs of individuals in that population. The cost distribution is almost certainly a power law. I’d guess the median is zero and the mean is many thousand dollars.

You can move OTP generation to slot 2. This prevents accidental triggering by requiring a much longer press.

https://support.yubico.com/support/solutions/articles/150000...

Every jurisdiction regulates financial institutions for good reasons (yes, also some bad reasons). While a great deal of misbehavior does persist under regulation (Wells Fargo, etc), it’s a fraction of what we would see if they were not or could not be regulated.

Inspectable and freezable payments systems are one core part of the infrastructure that enables regulation. The point at which it looks like Blockchain technologies are successfully enabling an alternative financial system that’s not subject to these controls is the point at which blockchain technology gets severely constrained by law.

Intermediaries aren’t always a bad thing. Stock settlement intermediation was transformative for the securities industry, greatly increasing the liquidity of the market.

Oh, I have fond memories of 36-bit byte pointers.

My first two programming jobs were in PDP-10/20 Assembly. Occasionally someone will complain about network specs that say octet instead of byte. And I‘ll just casually say, well some machines had variable byte sizes and go back to what I was doing, waiting for them to start sputtering.

Bliss is Ignorance

Actually it was a very nice language and certainly an improvement over writing system software in assembly language.

Under-taxation of corporations plays a significant role in the decline of research spending. While potential competitive advantage is one reason to pursue research and development, taxes and the interplay between tax and corporate accounting are another reason (even prior to 1981).

While taxes paid by corporations benefit the general public, from the corporation’s point of view taxes are money out the door with zero possible return. So what does a prudent corporation do with its profits? It recognizes that they are potential capital and seeks to maximize the risk-adjusted return on capital.

It can bank them at the risk-free rate of return, but we should remember taxes will take a healthy chunk out of that return on the front end. It can pay them out to investors as dividends (increasing the return on remaining capital by reducing the denominator). Note that under rational tax schemes the risk adjusted return on capital should be equivalent to investing at the risk free rate of return (modulo management of cash-flow risks). It can buy riskier assets with higher return, such as other companies. And it can make much riskier investments, like research and development. As with most things financial, the best overall risk adjusted return on capital is diverse in both kind and in risk level. It should do all of those things (treating dividends as equivalent to investment at the risk free rate of return), with the proportion going to each tuned to achieve the aggregate optimum(1). Also, can you see how a regulated utility with(like AT&T of old) would find R&D attractive for spicing up its asset mix?

Think of R&D as producing a stream of lottery tickets with the drawing in the distant future. Those lottery tickets (for a tech company) can pay off in two ways. One is that they could produce or enhance a revenue stream. The other is that they could reduce risk in the form of patents (reduce competitive risk and risk of patent suits by threat of countersuit). Both of these payoffs improve risk adjusted return on capital (by generating return or reducing risk). The neat thing about R&D for a company that’s paying real taxes is that much of the cost is (from a tax point of view) is an expense. In other words, that allocation of capital doesn’t have the upfront bite taken out of it that occurs when profits are directed to risk free assets. Looking at this from a risk-adjusted return point of view, having a real tax burden increases the appetite for risk by decreasing the relative attractiveness of the risk-free alternative after taxes. This is doubly true for expenditures that look like expenses to tax collectors but look like capital investment for corporate accounting purposes.

None of this holds true if a company isn’t paying much in the way of taxes on its profits. It doesn’t mean some amount of R&D isn’t still attractive, but the appetite for risk is lower. And let’s be clear, R&D in research labs is the riskiest kind of R&D.

Well, you might say, the 1981 R&D tax credit is sweeter than a deduction. Doesn’t that tilt the scales back? Yes, but subject to the limitations of the tax credit (which are numerous). But, like the deduction, the tax credit is much less valuable for companies that aren’t paying taxes on their profits. And, to be clear, this is a Reagan measure taken with full knowledge of what was expected to happen to corporate tax rates and the impact that might have on R&D investment. It’s a partial mitigant for that, nothing more.

I am fully aware that I have murdered both CAPM and the practice of accounting in compressing this down to a reasonable post with what I hope is a clear narrative. My apologies to practitioners of both.

(1) An important aside: People make equity investments to take more risk in the expectation of higher return. Beyond the cash cushion necessary for minimizing cash-flow risk, massive cash hoards do nothing but dilute the risk (and return) rational investors are actively seeking to take. There is some argument to be made that large tech companies keep huge cash hoards because their core businesses are riskier than they appear (esp black swan events), but it probably has more to do with founders desire for independence.

Regarding the people who have approached me regarding transitions they want but feel they can never make. They are not happy at their situation, but cultural, economic, and other barriers seem (and may be) insurmountable. The vast majority of these trans people merely want to interact with someone who will see them as they see themselves. Some of them want to hear first hand about situations where trans people can be themselves safely. It’s the comfort of catching a glimpse of the promised land, even if you can’t enter it yourself.

Regarding what transitioning is. For some people, transition can be entirely social with no medical element. Hormones are not a required part of medical transition. I know at lease one trans person who has had some surgery and no hormones ever, by choice. I also know of two trans people who have had some medical transition but haven’t socially transitioned.

For many trans people, there’s a set of incongruities between how they experience themselves and how they are seen, their bodies, how they’re allowed to present themselves, etc. Things that are actively distressing for one trans person may not bother another one. One way to look at transition is the process addressing the important (to the individual) self-perceived incongruities.

Regarding how many trans people there are and how do I know so many. Everyone I have spoken about is someone that I have met in person. A couple of hundred, at least. A lot of that is involvement in LGBTQ rights, which tends to put me in the presence of people who are social super-connectors. Some of that was a period of being the only out executive at a big company. There was a while where HR would give my contact info to every person who told them of a desire to transition at work.

But the two biggest factors are a) living somewhere that it’s relatively safe to transition and b) being deliberately visible in a lot of ways. Trans people absolutely migrate to places where they can be themselves safely. Trans people pretty much have full legal equality in California (not The same as social equality). So trans people come here. Washington and Oregon come close to legal equality, as does most of the east coast as far south as Virginia. A lot of cities in otherwise hostile states provide protections. Iowa City and a few other towns in Iowa are decent places to be trans. And even without legal protections, some places are islands of relative safety.

So, in my extended community of friends there are several trans people, and not because I sought them out. Just because there are a lot of trans people here. Three people from the 50-odd person Company I worked at in 2008 have subsequently come out as trans (pre-transition for me and the introduction to them was made by a former Wall Street colleague).

Being willing to be publicly identified as trans means cis friends connect me to trans friends, especially those just coming out. Occasionally some of those people become friends.

Closeted trans people are still trans. Many trans people regard themselves as having always been trans, even though they figured it out later in life. Some trans people talk about “before I was trans”. There’s no monolith of experience or language for describing it.

I actually think the number of trans people is closer to 2-3%, but the studies for that have methodological problems (the percentage is much higher, but there’s a failure to distinguish between types of gender non-conformity). I don’t really care, other than the increasing number of people who decide transition being seen as contagion.

There is one thing that’s “contagious”. Seeing a happy trans person changes your world if your trans and you believe trans people are sad and tragic. You can’t unsee that. Almost every trans person I know has some story about how someone they barely knew came to them and told them that seeing them changed their lives.

It’s not a mass phenomenon. Neither is Autism. Fewer people are trans than are gay, but nobody really knows. At the bottom end it’s 0.3%-0.6% of the population, but that’s only people who are out. If you survey people in their low 20s, it’s higher. We’re a little less common than redheads in all likelihood. Gay people in the early 80s knew there were a lot more gay people than straight people saw, but they had no idea what the true numbers were. It’s like that.

Most of the trans people I know aren’t remotely avant-garde. I know a bunch of suburban women in monogamous relationships with their spouses or partners. I know a couple of suburban trans guys who are still married to the men they married before they figured it out, one of them with kids. I know several trans guys in health care. I do know a few trans people who are artist and writer types and are more flamboyant. The first trans woman I met worked at the same Wall Street brokerage I did and was very quiet.

When I go to (back when travel was a thing) places that are less friendly than the coasts and people see the trans flag pin on my bag, I frequently have people come out to me and talk about how they can never transition.

There is really no orthodoxy beyond believe people about their gender. Trans people are very different from each other and their experience of being trans varies wildly. There’s some agreement around language and tropes that seem to provoke violence towards us, but many trans people use language to describe themselves that other trans people would be offended by. But that’s true of gay people too.

The freestanding house I grew up in (in Fieldston in the Bronx) looks just like it did when I was a kid. And it looked the same in Google Streetview until the pictures of that neighborhood were pulled (presumably at the request of the neighborhood association).

I think the photographs are all of properties on which property tax is paid. Also, I loved in that building too, when my ex-wife was doing her medical internship at the Animal Medical Center.

It’s not sound and ultimately it’s based in the grief of people who believe they have somehow lost their child (or spouse, or sibling) because they transitioned. I don’t want to minimize the pain of people who have this mindset, no matter how destructive it is. Their sense of loss is genuine and it drives them to the same level of commitment that you see from parents who lose a child to a drunk driver. But, while the pain is real, the loss is either not real or is self-inflicted. Trans people leave the lives of people who won’t let them be themselves, but we don’t stop loving our family because we’re trans.

More people are transitioning, at all ages. More of the people who do so are visible, because of modest reductions in stigma and because there’s no longer a requirement that we disappear and cut all ties (the medical establishment used to require this). Your typical 40-50 year old parent has no idea how many of the people they went to High School and College with are trans, because they were hidden. In much the same way people had no idea how many people were gay. So this looks like an explosive change. I do expect we will see much less late transition (later than early adulthood), because more of those trans people will transition earlier.

So, why are more people transitioning? Because it’s possible and they understand it to be possible, not because there are more people who are trans. This is why it’s happening across all ages. I am a late transitioner. I started to transition as soon as I understood three things: that being trans and transitioning was a real thing, that I would not destroy my life by doing so, and that trans people can live happy fulfilled lives.

What about desistance? Some small percentage of people who transition decide that it wasn’t right for them. Most of them because of oppression, but some because it doesn’t work for them. This is much smaller than the set of people who regret that they didn’t transition, or that they waited so long to do so. It’s lower than the rate of regret for any elective surgery. There is some risk that non-binary kids who emphatically reject their assigned sex at birth are getting social pressure to conform to the other end of the binary. The pressure to be not trans at all is still very high. High enough that I don’t worry about cis kids being pressured into transition.

And there are many trans people who don’t need or want to transition, who find sufficient expression or acknowledgement in other ways. They aren’t less trans, you just don’t know they are.

Market surveillance is much better than most people realize. The accounts making money on a scam like this would be identified, filtered for anomalous activity, and the people at the other end investigated.

I am not personally offended by this terminology.

Yes, I have been told that more than once. Usually in requests to address the issue as quietly as possible. It’s always been in the context of new development rather than a request to retrofit older systems), but I don’t know if that’s self-censoring or indifference.

We aren’t talking about cultural appropriation, so why bring it up?

This is about an under-represented group (in tech) subject to current-day prejudice. That’s not irrelevant to how the language is received.

Half my ancestors (English) brutally oppressed the other half (Irish and Scottish). None of that oppression is part of my current day experience. But this isn’t true for Black Americans.

How many Black engineers have you worked with?

A lot of this terminology is specifically rather than generally problematic.

Please. Even if you don't believe that the terminology has a role in perpetuating stereotypes, it does make people feel uncomfortable and unwelcome.

Unless you have trusted a CA from your ISP, they won't have a valid cert. They can divert the packETS, but their response will be invalid (fail when the client checks the cert).

Economics and government are both taught in many public health programs. It has long been recognized that many public health problems have significant economic drivers. Public health policy analysis has long had cost/benefit as critical.

The relative humidity in NYC does not vary much from 60-65%. Absolute humidity is measured as grams water per cubic meter and is virtually never reported because what is relevant to human comfort is evaporation.

Indoor humidity in the winter is generally low because increasing the temperature without adding moisture is lowers relative humidy.

https://weather-and-climate.com/average-monthly-Humidity-per...

Referring to David Moon namelessly as "the author" in comments about language design (on Hacker News of all places) does not inspire confidence. Whether or not you agree with him, Moon has been involved in language design and implementation for decades. His perspective is directly relevant to discussion that's primarily focused on large scale trends in language design. I don't necessarily agree with everything he says here, but it is definitely worth thinking about, especially where it challenges accepted dogma.

In userland, for one. Or an unprivileged service in a microkernel O/S. There are a lot of concerns jammed into the current concept of filesystem.