yetanotherphd

I was skeptical, but tentatively convinced by the end of the section on the hypersphere volume/surface area.

I don't think it's worth actually changing things, but if we can accept that 2pi is a more natural constant than pi, then it should help us write more sensible formulas, even if the symbol tau isn't used.

Well it's possible for people to obtain negative learning, e.g. learning things that are false.

I would consider anyone who studies Marxism to be in this category.

For most people, it is a blend of positive knowledge, and the political prejudice of their discipline, so one should neither reject or blindly accept the views of an "expert" in the social sciences.

My PhD is in economics, and I would love to be able to pull rank on people who talk about "buying locally" or putting people before profits. But there is no way to consistently enable such rank pulling, since there is a Professor of Marxist Economics somewhere would could accuse me of being ignorant of 100 years of Marxist thought, and give me 1000 books to read before I'm qualified to speak on the topic.

So the only way forward is to reach out to the public and convince them that one's discipline knows the truth.

How dare a person be concerned about their own life and wellbeing, and not whatever minority group is being promoted this week. Why do rich, White, privileged founders think their lives are of any interest on news.ycombinator.com anyway?

The relationship between developer and manager is something that is continually evolving and being renegotiated. After all, most states are "at will".

Whether pay or conditions, there is nothing wrong with having a discussion and asking for changes (or in this case, retaining the status quo).

I do agree that "having good developers is a privilege" is a strange viewpoint. In fact, people often say I could get 30% more easily" when that isn't the case. So I take most of this question with a pinch of salt.

I see. Great article by the way, I learnt tensor products through physics/exterior algebra, but they tend to teach tensor products and symmetrization/antisymmetrization at the same time. Seeing the plain tensor product was very informative.

Where? You should point this out so the author can correct it - I couldn't find a point where f-hat was described as multi-linear, which would certainly be a mistake.* It looked to me that f-hat was correctly described as a linear map throughout the article.

*Yes, technically a linear map is a multilinear map with rank-1.

The problem with this article is that the author's field is full of experts who have wildly different opinions. There is no way to appeal to expertise in this situation. For example, he says

> The death of expertise is a rejection not only of knowledge, but of the ways in which we gain knowledge and learn about things. Fundamentally, it’s a rejection of science and rationality, which are the foundations of Western civilization itself. Yes, I said “Western civilization”: that paternalistic, racist, ethnocentric approach to knowledge that created the nuclear bomb, the Edsel, and New Coke, but which also keeps diabetics alive, lands mammoth airliners in the dark, and writes documents like the Charter of the United Nations.

But there are many experts in sociology who would ask us precisely to reject science, rationality and Western Civilization.

I think a far better approach is to educate all people better, so they are able to properly appreciate the knowledge of experts because they understand the field. One aspect of this would be teaching a lot more statistics, although the classical fields of debate and critical reasoning are also important.

Another problem is that many people, especially academics, think it is more important to push a particular agenda, than to make the public more informed in general. Hence people who want to promote gay rights, for example, don't want people to know that the probability getting AIDS from heterosexual intercourse with a White woman is extremely low. But in order to do this, they have to actively lower people's understanding of probability and statistics. They have to teach people to ignore their (admittedly imperfect) intuition about conditional probability.

You are engaging in the ad populum fallacy fallacy.

That is, you wrongly believe that the popularity of a language isn't, in itself, evidence of its usefulness.

A lot of people making decisions on which language to use are very qualified and knowledgeable. When they choose clojure over scheme, they do it for good reasons.

People have a right to use ad-blockers. It's their computer after all.

However, a lot of things that people like to use, and might even have been willing to watch ads in order to use, will not be viable if everyone used adblockers.

It's really that simple. However, most people don't like to acknowledge that given the opportunity, the will freeload of others, or that in some contexts freeloading is natural and not immoral

No, he mean all social commentary. Almost all of the journalists and professors who preach the point of view you advocate (big bad corporations and fox news stealing from the poor) did not themselves experience poverty. And some right-wingers experienced it too. So "throw out stuff I don't like" does not follow from your claim that only people who have experienced poverty can speak about it.

There is something very wrong with the logic of this article.

The author claims that people rational people only value money because it allows them to consume.

But that graph shows income vs consumption in a given time period. But whatever is left over, will be consumed in the future, which people also value (and if they didn't, it would be irrational to save any money in the first place!)

They key error is in the phrase

>I propose that utility is a monotonic function of spending - this means that people prefer to increase the amount of goods and services they consume. A green piece of paper doesn’t make me very happy, but the burrito I trade it for does.

This is in itself true, but again, money allows you to consume in the future, if you don't spend it.

A more relevant graph would be income vs post tax/welfare income. But that is a different matter.

I'm adding them to my resume right now.

Even though that is a Master's thesis, the writing is sophomoric.

I was especially offended by the misuse of "externality" in the first page: "Lower income people should not bear the brunt of the negative externalities of economic development" (she is referring to housing prices, which are not an exernality).

You know what else Google gives it's employees? Tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of dollars.

How is this any different the the "pandering" you describe?

Taking a bus, and having people hate you so much they attack your bus. That is privilege.

Money is indeed power, but ideally it would not be political power.

But money is the power to obtain goods that you want, even if other people want those same things. In this case, it is living in SF. Googlers have the right to spend their money as they see fit. The government will always be there to take taxes and use them for the public good. But what is left in the employees paycheck is for them to spend.

I am much more concerned about the power of mobs, than the power of money (at least the money of small players like Google employees - billionaires like George Soros do concern me). This is actually a positive step in protecting an under-privileged group (nerds) from left wing thugs.

In my high school, the preferred term was faggot.

Homophobia is passe now, but I hope the word "nerd" will serve people who want to stir up hate against us just as well.

Good for Google for doing this. I like this a lot better than making concessions to the thugs that threaten Google employees or Google's property.

No I meant the squatting market, although I was using the term market ironically.

The existence of the "right" to squat is a historical accident, and this legal right should be eliminated entirely.

There is no contradiction, but I may make different simplifying assumptions in different contexts. At first, I was replying to a person who claimed that even the free market wage for programmers was excessive. In that context I was ignoring market power on both sides, and assuming a perfect free market.

When you brought up unions, I pointed out that since tech workers have less market power than doctors and lawyers, they are actually underpaid relative to these groups.

To clarify: I think that doctors and lawyers would still be highly paid if they had no market power, because their skills/abilities are valuable.

So my point of view is that market wages are in accordance to the value that people produce, but people can sometimes obtain more by having market power (or less, if the employers have market power). It seems that you think higher wages only come from market power.

On a union for Googlers, what would stop someone else from joining Google and not joining the union, in exchange for better pay/conditions in the short term.

Paying teachers more won't magically make them better teachers. I have been told by experts that there is strong evidence that better teachers achieve better results for students. From this it follows that if there were a way to identify potentially good teachers, it would make sense to attract these people by offering higher salaries.

But that would involve hiring different people (who would probably demand higher salaries), not paying existing teachers more.

The fact is that some people are more valuable than others. Not in an existential sense, but in the sense of how much their labor is worth the market.

Senior management are a special case. I think many of them are people with exceptional ability, but it is harder to argue that their wages are "market wages" because they tend to determine their own salaries. There are many market frictions that are particular to the shareholder-manager relationship. These might potentially allow senior management to extract "economic rent" i.e. wages that are beyond the value they produce.

yeah it's hard to find examples of high wage workers who aren't in some sense unionized. Not really sure what your point is though. After all, if their wages are in part due to being part of a cartel, then tech workers who earn that wage without a cartel are even more deserving of it.

It's great that someone is finally disrupting the squatting market.

The contracts that these so called guardians have seem strange though. Are they standard rental contracts, because the conditions described wouldn't be legal where I live. I wonder if courts will at some stage decide that there people really are renting, and are therefore entitled to all the legal protection of renters.

I had hoped this would be about the revolution occurring in statistics/econometrics where confidence intervals based on strong parametric assumptions (e.g. the confidence intervals you would obtain using the standard deviation) are being replaced by confidence intervals obtained using the bootstrap (and other non-parametric methods) that don't rely on such strong assumptions.

But no, it is just advocating using Mean absolute distance instead of the standard deviation. Which I guess is to be expected from someone whose work focuses mostly on long-tailed distributions.

Still, I think that non-parametric methods are much more valuable as a solution to dealing with non-normal data than what Taleb is proposing.

Only people who don't understand that wages come from the value a person produces. Lawyers, doctors, professional athletes, also get high wages and are entitled to them. If you want to adjust income inequality you have to do it across the board, through taxation, not by shaming individual industries.

We get paid so much because we produce that much value. But if these allegations are true, we aren't getting paid enough.

Apart from the obvious political justifications (people want the union vote) there are some sound reasons why unions are different from cartels like the employers in the article are alleged to have formed.

A cartel is several companies colluding to raise prices above/below the market price.

A labor union might be though of in the same way, but in practice is is very hard for a union to really control the supply of labor, because it is made up of thousands of people. It is only when they are tacitly allowed to use force/violence that unions can effectively prevent strike-breakers.

So given how ineffective they are at permanently raising wages (perhaps they raise wages a bit, but not nearly as much as if they had a true monopoly), unions should probably be allowed since if people choose to join them, they must provide some other benefits, such as representing individual workers with grievances, etc.

You have misunderstood the analogy.

The issue is not whether the collusion is public or private, and it is also not whether it benefits the rich or the poor.

The issue is that in general it is illegal to reduce competition by forming a cartel. People to it privately because it is illegal. The one exception for this is forming a cartel of sellers of labor, i.e. a union. Note that, if it were not a labor union, a cartel would be illegal even if it was benefiting poor people at the expense or big corporations.

A much better reason for allowing labor unions, is that unless they use physical force (which of course they do, all the time, but I am speaking theoretically here), they don't really create that much market power. People can always choose to work during a strike (again, assuming the union doesn't physically stop them, which is in theory illegal). If unions don't create market power, what is the point of them? I think they can be useful to help management to stick to long-term commitments they make to workers, and to provide an alternate way for workers to be represented in the company.

Since it is written in C, it is easy for the interpreter to define a C API that exposes the Python runtime (Python.h). This means python C extensions can have access to the python runtime.

Excellent point, often when people talk about disrupting the medical industry, it looks like what they are really doing is making a similar product to what exists, but choosing not to collect the monopoly rent like other players.

>The unprincipled among us may encounter other obstacles.

Too ashamed of the violence you promote to be explicit about it huh? People like you belong in prison.