Hacker News Reader

xileron Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?

Nuclear companies generally aren't prepared to assume full liability for nuclear accidents [1]. This makes me pretty skeptical that nuclear power is really that safe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...

xileron Tourists on Tech's Toll Roads

Roads are non-rivalrous (to an extent). Meaning during off-peak times a private toll road would likely be under utilized if it were not regulated/subsidized. Another reason is that if a road happens to be the shortest path between a populous area and an in-demand destination it would likely be something close to a natural monopoly. This could potentially lead to high prices, too many billboards, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rivalry_(economics)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

xileron Amazon deletes job listings for analysts to track ‘labor organizing threats’

> actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker.

I think it's a fairly well established industry trend that, on average, union membership is a net positive for the worker.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_wage_premium

xileron CEO of Uber: Gig Workers Deserve Better

Another measure is major sector labor productivity (labor inputs vs outputs):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workforce_productivity#/media/...

xileron Thomas Sowell interview

> And I would also expect that social mobility would decrease as an economy "matures". If you're in a developing country seeing 7-10% GDP growth, then you'd hope mobility is higher than an economy growing at 1-2% per year.

They address that in the paper:

> Higher GDP growth rates do not substantially increase the number of children who earn more than their parents because a large fraction of GDP goes to a small number of high income earners today. To see why absolute mobility is insensitive to the growth rate when growth is distributed unequally, consider the extreme case in which one child obtains all of the increase in GDP. In this case, higher GDP growth rates would have no effect on absolute mobility. More generally, GDP growth has larger effects on absolute mobility when growth is spread more broadly, allowing more children to achieve higher living standards than their parents. Higher GDP growth and a broader distribution of growth have a multiplicative effect on absolute mobility: Absolute mobility is highest when GDP growth rates are high and growth is spread broadly across the distribution.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6336/398.full

xileron Thomas Sowell interview

Interesting read, but supposedly when we're talking about changes in social mobility we really care about the change in the percentage of people that are richer than their parents? Indeed towards the end of the article the author says:

> There is one study of progress over time that follows parents and children that is gloomy and that is “The Fading American Dream: Trends in Absolute Mobility Since 1940” by Raj Chetty, David Grusky, Maximilian Hell, Nathaniel Hendren, Robert Manduca, Jimmy Narang (Chetty et al) They find that if you were born in 1940, you had a 92% chance of surpassing your parents income. But if you were born in 1984, the number is a depressing 50%. Chetty et al control for age — this is for parents and children when they are both 30. This does suggest that the American dream is dead or at least dying — half of the children do better than their parents but half do worse, suggesting no progress over time.

The author then says that we should measure income differently by using a non-standard measure of inflation. But if we had just used that non-standard measure on the wage data of Piketty et al., we would've arrived at the same conclusion anyway?

xileron Statement by Jeff Bezos to the U.S. House Committee on the Judiciary

> We seek to do this as far as the law allows us to do, and other companies do that as well. We operate within the rules placed on us by the legislatures of this country and its states.

Sure, but this is an antitrust hearing and trusts aren't really legal in the US.

xileron Breach exposed more than one million DNA profiles on a major genealogy database

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homomorphic_encryption

xileron Abstract Wikipedia

He also works on Google's Knowledge Graph

https://research.google/people/vrandecic/

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

xileron Losing the war against surveillance capitalism letting Big Tech frame the debate

Off the top of my head the risk of identity theft and black mail are probably biggest reasons why privacy is important. This is especially concerning when you realize how "secure" data often leaks and becomes public.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches

xileron Postbank to replace 12M bank cards after employees steal 'master key'

https://www.opensecrets.org.za/agm/

xileron Amazon VP Resigns, Calls Company ‘Chickenshit’ for Firing Protesting Workers

Employees are subject to intense competition for employment, while big companies face much less competition [1]. This means that, all other things being equal, big companies are less unaccountable than their employees. While this dynamic certainly doesn't guarantee abuses of power on behalf of big companies I think it makes sense to be inherently suspicious of their actions.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

xileron Venezuela to Close Pumps as Gas Runs Short, Viral Outbreak Grows

I'd say that's a bit of a false dilemma. Countries like South Korea and Taiwan have dealt with this problem far better than other countries despite having very few lockdowns [1,2]. Instead they have made use of government funded distribution of free masks and testing and now have a low or declining number of active cases [3,4,5].

[1] https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/30...

[2] https://chinapost.nownews.com/20200317-1094238

[3] https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3869320

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_T...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_coronavirus_pandemic_in_S...

xileron Bloomberg bankrolls a social-media army

I think this practice is a bit worse than other forms of electioneering since it is not clear if views being expressed come directly from the candidate or not (unlike a TV ad or a rally). When governments do something similar this, their methods are rightly criticized as being undemocratic [1,2]. I think a similar line of reasoning applies to US election politics.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_web_brigades

xileron Kickstarter employees vote to unionize

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony

xileron Tech giants have as much money and influence as nations

I think the company-country analogy is stronger than you claim.

> A nation uphelds the law whereas a company uses proxies (lobbying) to make laws

Once companies can influence the government, any special abilities of the government (export controls, legal system, etc.) can, at least to some extent, be harnessed by high-net-worth individuals/companies [1].

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...

xileron Google is not a search engine, but an ad engine

Fair points, but on the other hand, to quote Page and Brin:

"we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline’s homepage when the airline’s name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want." [1]

[1] Larry Page and Sergey Brin, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998

xileron Belarus’s Soviet Economy

Note though that when many of the former soviet economies liberalized some of their economic and social outcomes were initially not so great. They experienced high inflation and, in some cases, a sharp drop in life expectancy. [1,2]

I understand that some economists explain the high inflation by saying that pent-up demand was "unleashed" after the Soviet Union collapsed. To me this seems kinda hand-wavy (is it possible to measure pent-up demand?).

On a related note, something that comes close to a natural experiment is a comparison of the economic history of Finland and Russia. Finland was part of the Russian empire and, like the rest of Russia, was very poor at the time. It then broke away during the civil war, which is, of course, around the time that Soviet communism began to take root. Meanwhile, a little later, Finland took took a different economic path and instead implemented some social democratic policies and is now per capita richer than Russia and indeed many countries in Europe. [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transition_economy#Transition_...

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?location...

[3] I realize Finland is not a perfect social democratic economy, but it is a closer approximation than most European economies

xileron Survey: Average American Hasn’t Made a New Friend in 5 Years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone

xileron Africa Is Building an A.I. Industry That Doesn’t Look Like Silicon Valley

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18369384

xileron Student rating app penalizes fifth-graders who need bathroom breaks

If you haven't already, I highly recommend you read We by Zamyatin [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_%28novel%29

xileron A Technology Freelancer's Guide to Starting a Worker Cooperative [pdf]

Has anyone looked into creating a cooperative data labeling service similar to Scale AI, except where labels are owned by the people who created them? Perhaps this might even increase label quality by aligning the interests of the labelers with the people who use them?

xileron Exploring Weight Agnostic Neural Networks

In the related work section of their paper they mention that WANNs are related to genetic programming [1], a subfield of evolutionary algorithms.

Genetic programming is quite a powerful tool. IIRC, a few years ago, a researcher evolved expressions to model the dynamics of a double pendulum based only on measured data. To his surprise he found that the expressions were the Lagrangian of the system.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_programming

xileron Technically, Earth Does Not Orbit Around the Sun (2014)

IIRC objects experiencing acceleration (e.g. planets orbiting each other) are not subject to Galilean relativity like objects that are moving at a constant velocity (e.g. ball being thrown on a train). So when planets orbit each other, there is only a singe valid frame of reference.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach's_principle

xileron What's the minimum number of words you'd need to define all other words? (2012)

You could try this using WordNet

https://wordnet.princeton.edu/

xileron Wage Stagnation

I'm not sure about 'non-physical labor' but an IMF report [1] found that in many industrialized countries, such as the US, Germany, Japan, etc., depressed wages correlate strongly with low labor union participation rates. Surprisingly, other factors such as globalization and automation where found to be of little significance.

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/03/pdf/jaumo...

xileron It’s time to balance the power between workers and employers

In the current economy I feel co-ops are bit too radical to remedy the imbalances of power within large businesses (where it really matters). We might need something less aggressive like the widespread promotion of Employee Stock Ownership Programs (ESOPs) as a start [1]. Also co-ops might come across to business people as something along the lines of "loony-leftist Marxist idealism". Instead one can speak their language by saying things like "decentralizing planning" and "capitalism where everyone is a capitalist" and show how there is indeed common ground. An excellent example of this is The Capitalist Manifesto by Luis Kelso [2] (the creator of ESOPs).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_stock_ownership_plan

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Capitalist_Manifesto

xileron IT is the cause of rising income and wealth inequality since the 1970s [pdf]

> The low labor share in the 1980's is then out of line with the rest of our results. However, it is compatible with the fact that wage growth and labor share started to fall early in the 1970's, caused by factors not present in our study. Political factors such as laws to weaken unions, automation, outsourcing, and globalization were operative even before the rise of monopoly power in the 1980's. Hence, by the time monopoly power came into play, wages and labor share were already low. Hence, apart from rising monopoly power, other factors had an impact on the dynamics of wages and labor share which are not examined here.

Indeed when we compare the inequality present in different industrialized nations with varying degrees of unionization, nations with stronger unions seem to have lower inequality despite experiencing an increase in automation. As stated in an IMF report [1]:

Traditional explanations for the rise of inequality in advanced economies are skill-biased technological change and globalization, which have increased the relative demand for skilled workers, benefiting top earners relative to average earners. But technology and globalization foster economic growth, and there is little policymakers can or are willing to do to reverse these trends. Moreover, while high-income countries have been similarly affected by technological change and globalization, inequality in these economies has risen at different speeds and magnitudes.

So perhaps the combination of automation together with weakened unions is responsible for inequality in industrialized nations?

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/fandd/2015/03/pdf/jaumo...

xileron String theorist Edward Witten says consciousness “will remain a mystery”

In particular see the "Mary the super-scientist" thought experiment for a nice explanation of the difference between the two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_argument

http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/F...

xileron Correlation implies Causation (2009)

I'm no expert on this subject but the proof in the first article seems a bit dodgy. Bayesian inference is a type of induction [1]. So using it to prove induction merely begs the question?

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/#BaySub