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xrangeon What Americans Don’t Get About Nordic Countries

I've always wanted to hear a Swedish perspective on the Wallenberg family. Who apparently "In the 1990s indirectly controlled a third of Swedish GNP."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallenberg_family

xrangeon The Lisp Curse (2011)

In Prolog you have the ability to create new postfix operators. Of course Prolog being a logic language and not a functional language, along with '!' being used for 'cut' opens up another can of worms.

http://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/man?predicate=op/3

xrangeon The Lisp Curse (2011)

If you substitute APL or Smalltalk into what you've written, I don't see a majority of APL and Smalltalk users disagreeing with it.

xrangeon The Lisp Curse (2011)

>What language allows you...

SML allows you to have an infix function named "P", and Haskell allows something similar, although you have to quote it with backticks and can't use a capital letter to start a function name...

https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Standard_ML_Programming/Expres...

https://wiki.haskell.org/Infix_operator#Using_prefix_functio...

xrangeon The Lisp Curse (2011)

    c = sqrt(a*a + b*b)
    
    (set! c (sqrt (+ (* a a) (* b b))))

xrangeon The Lisp Curse (2011)

I wonder why there is all the anguish around why Lisp hasn't flourished, and seemingly less anguish around APL, or even Smalltalk. Is there a reason it engenders so much loyalty? Is it the idea that macros allow you to extend the language, and that seems like the pinnacle of the programming hierarchy? Could there be insight gleaned from looking at programming languages as a fad or style?

xrangeon The Lisp Curse (2011)

A better question: "What impressive programs are written in Lisp?". Or "Why isn't there a Squeak-like Lisp machine environment, where 'compatibility' doesn't have to matter?". If a language is incredibly productive and programmable, why don't we already have a VPRI-like STEPS environment in 20,000 lines?

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2011004_steps11.pdf

xrangeon New Dilemmas for the Prisoner (2013)

Anyone have recommendation for good books on game theory or prisoner's deilemma's? I could see lots of variations on a theme, where you have:

* Precisely finite games (for example, exactly 100 games).

* Finite games where the number of games is random. How does strategy change when you know you'll be playing somewhere between 95-105 games vs. 60-140 games?

* Games where players can "pay" for awards or punishments out of their own fixed pot, instead of the externally set payoffs. What are good strategies for starting out with a small pot, vs. a large pot, and how to best cope with "inequality".

xrangeon New Dilemmas for the Prisoner (2013)

Some further links:

Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma contains strategies that dominate any evolutionary opponent

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22615375

Extortion and cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma

http://numerical.recipes/whp/StewartPlotkinExtortion2012.pdf

Zero-Determinant Strategies in the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma

https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2012/07/zerodeterminant...

xrangeon New Dilemmas for the Prisoner (2013)

Thanks for reposting this, quite interesting.

xrangeon Idea Debt

She has written a few books:

http://www.amazon.com/Tina-Seelig/e/B00MAPL7P0

...and has a blog:

http://creativityrulz.blogspot.com/

...and here are some video lectures:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/search;jsessionid=833B2D89C66AC2...

...any recommendations on the books?

xrangeon Idea Debt

Could testosterone be a factor?

http://healthland.time.com/2011/09/13/why-do-dads-have-lower...

xrangeon An Optimist's Reply to Ezra Klein

I've always wanted to hear a Swedish perspective on the Wallenberg family. Who apparently "In the 1990s indirectly controlled a third of Swedish GNP."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallenberg_family

xrangeon Physicists and Philosophers Debate the Boundaries of Science

>* There would be no superconductive magnets.

Can you expand upon this? I'm unclear as to which of Einstein's theories you are referencing.

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

xrangeon How Finland's Basic Income Experiment Will Work

Yes, speaking of experiments, I don't see why the U.S. doesn't run a large scale experiment to see what the effects of a basic income are. Select a small but not insignificant demographic. Pay them a not-means-tested monthly stipend. Since this is only a test, you should be able to pay for it with a modest tax on paychecks for the rest of the citizens. Then wait a while, and see what happens. We would want to make sure it cuts across a broad swath of society, so that special interests don't wreck havoc when interpreting the results. So we'd want rich and poor, of all races, etc.. We should then be able to look at the recipients, and tell if they were more likely or less likely to be employed. And we should be able to see if they spending their time creating cutting-edge art, and new innovative music, while writing inspiring novels, and discovering new scientific facts and mathematical theorems. To be doubly sure that we aren't merely papering over any medical insurance issues (what with medical inflation and all), we might also create a separate medical payment system to cover their medical expenses. Of course, this should be a long running experiment, so that any short term economic and societal effects will have time to average out. Let's propose to run this experiment, for, I don't know, maybe 80 years.

xrangeon Advanced economies are so sick we need a new way to think about them

Here's a great opportunity for a little informal HN poll. When was the last time you used the postal service to send a letter? Sure, I've got a box that gets junk mail every day, but the only time I send anything are one-off bills where they don't have an option for on-line payments.

xrangeon A group of middle-aged whites in the U.S. is dying at a startling rate

I wonder if anyone has thoughts on the book "The Games People Play", and more specifically the "Alcoholic" game:

http://www.ericberne.com/games-people-play/alcoholic/

https://archive.org/details/TheGamesPeoplePlay

xrangeon Etsy Manufacturing Opens to Designers

I'd say the "source code" for your designs is hand-crafted, but the material coming off the CNC machine is not. It may not be mass manufacturing, but if additional copies are essentially a button-push away, I'd say that it wasn't hand crafted. Now if the setup time on the CNC machine took longer than making it on a manual mill/lathe, then we might have some grey area. BTW, what are you using for your "desktop CNC" machine? Do you have any recommendations? And what materials are you machining? Steel? Brass? Aluminum? Plastics?

xrangeon Decline in the labor share of income in the U.S.

So I guess once we get time machines, we'll have to worry about immigration from the past?

xrangeon Use this instead of press releases

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

xrangeon Decline in the labor share of income in the U.S.

>People with 1990 skills now are not employable today in many/most fields.

Citation or clarification or examples needed. If you started a job in 1990 at 25 years old, you'd only be 50 years old today. I don't think unemployment among 50 year olds is higher today than in 1990. So I guess they got upgraded skill along the way? Which fields are we talking about? Nursing? Law? Architecture? Garbage man? Interior decorator? Computer programmer? Car salesman? Retail worker? Heavy equipment operator?

http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cpseea10.htm

xrangeon The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

Am I missing something? It seems like all those transactions are merely exchanges, and no wealth has actually been created (i.e. new ipads, hepatitis treatments, Taylor Swift concert tickets, food grown, etc.).

xrangeon The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

>I think it's pretty normal to be extremely idealistic when you're raised in a middle class, educated bubble like I was.

So if you have kids someday, would you hope to raise them to be "worldly" or to have lived in a protective bubble?

xrangeon The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

From "A Short History of Cataract Surgery":

"Cataract surgery in its simplest form is at least 4000 years old. Couching for cataract was the earliest method at about 2000 BC, and even then was evidently practiced in the Tigris / Euphrates area, as well as India and Japan. The earliest records are from The Bible and The Red Sea Scrolls as well as early Hindu records of Susruta’s time."

http://www.rila.co.uk/issues/free/001/2001/v4n2/p61_65/p61_6...

xrangeon The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

>The young people of today are different...

"They have exalted notions, because they have not yet been humbled by life or learnt its necessary limitations; moreover, their hopeful disposition makes them think themselves equal to great things -- and that means having exalted notions. They would always rather do noble deeds than useful ones: their lives are regulated more by moral feeling than by reasoning; and whereas reasoning leads us to choose what is useful, moral goodness leads us to choose what is noble."

xrangeon The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

>The Ivy League will survive because of social and political momentum.

...and their endowments in $10-40 billion range:

http://www.ibtimes.com/ivy-league-endowments-2015-princeton-...

xrangeon The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

>I was brought up to respect my elders and to consider society as a mostly-altruistic, benevolent mass of humanity with a conscience bent more towards justice and meritocracy

Interesting. Do you see this as more of a failure in your upbringing, or of a failure of society to live up to your expectations? Has this realization changed your political thinking in any ways?

xrangeon The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

>the waste is not the economies fault, but that of whomever pursued that education.

I'm willing to place at least 75% of the blame on the recipient, but I try not to discount the previous 12+ years of "education is our greatest asset" propaganda targeted towards children.

xrangeon The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

>It's time to get to work, even if "work" is 20-30% (random number) tougher than what our parents dealt with.

...sounds like:

"Why Generation Y Yuppies are Unhappy" http://waitbutwhy.com/2013/09/why-generation-y-yuppies-are-u...

xrangeon The world needs at least 600M new jobs in the next decade for young people

>saddled by seemingly insurmountable college debt

Does anyone know of a source for statistics on student loan debt? This site

http://ticas.org/posd/map-state-data

...claims that the average debt of graduating seniors is $28.4k. I'd like to see a histogram of all recent graduates and dropouts, with the bins in dollars of debt. I'd also like to see a scatter plot showing the median debt vs. debtors age (for all age groups, not just recent grads). And another scatter plot of debt vs. income.