Sherlock

Agree, the book "Programming Bitcoin" by Song provides a detailed explanation of the algorithm.

Disagree with prosecuting drones instead of people actually giving orders.

This is the clearest signal to tell apart people who have studied applied math and people that haven't.

Fun fact: a big chunk of the lithium produced in the world is extracted from the Salar de Atacama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Atacama

The method is to concentrate the lithium (from <1% to 7%) via evaporation and then process this brine to produce lithium carbonate.

"The Magicians", "The Magician King", "The Magician's Land" - Lev Grossman. 4/5

"Inside Job" - Connie Willis. 4/5

"Norwegian Wood (Tokio Blues)" - Haruki Murakami. 4/5

"Old Man's War" - John Scalzi. 5/5

"Persepolis" - Marjane Satrapi. 5/5

Non fiction:

"The 10,000 year explosion" about recent evolution. 3/5 ton of evidence for their thesis, but lacks predictions.

"What if" well known by HN. 5/5

"The nurture assumption" about education, 2/5. Maybe a 4/5 when it was published, but now their ideas are in the water supply.

"The man who mistook his wife for a hat", by Oliver Sacks 4/5. Several stories about neurological deficits.

Automating the confection of clothes is VERY challenging from an engineering point of view. We need far better robots to automate that.

Care to give some recommendations for a newcomer to that genre?

Accounting doesn't work that way. You can have huge profits and reinvest them, but your income statement will show the profits in any case.

Yes, Amazon could be more profitable with different price points, but sales would take a hit, and thus their growth prospects.

FWIW, I think Amazon valuation is fair.

The "Original Sin" of not Governments not being able to get debt in the same currency they are able to collect taxes.

So, when the main source of USD suffers in some sense (export prices, or some kind of supply shock) the Government (unable to get funds) must retort to fiscal policy to meet its commitments. And fiscal policy is the number #1 recipe to get (hyper-)inflation

What's interesting from a game theory point of view is to have so many different parties with a FPTP electoral system.

You would expect a two party system.

The Economist published an interesting report about that some months ago. The main takeaways were that (1) Argentine was rich, but lagged behind its money-peers in human development indexes such as literacy rates and (2) The elite from Argentina benefited from high food prices, so the rest of the country resented them, a brewing pot for populism.

But your point stands, monetary (or fiscal) policy was awful.

The article doesn't mention the other obvious comparisons, the non-black latin american countries, such as Argentina and Chile.

For instance, Chile ranks higher than the US here, despite being a poorer country: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...

When banks go down they take down the economy with them; that's what 'too big to fail' means.

It's not worth all the human suffering caused by a depression instead of a recession just to prove that the banks should be more cautious.

In Chile the State pays for it.

The upward limit on the payment OTOH is quite low (<US$2k/month) but most employers choose to supplement the State payment with the balance of your paycheck.

That's a common (notation-induced) mistake. You just need to solve a linear system.

I would really like to read about the compact cassette design history. It's a really remarkable product in which you can appreciate a long list of trade-offs made by the designer(s).

That's strikingly accurate.

This looks about right for any kind of business, not just software development.

That's true. This should have two axes (at least). One with "domain specific knowledge" and other one with "programming expertise".

Indeed, when domain experts reach some arbitrary level of programming expertise, many good things may happen.

This is the usual practice here in Chile, and I don't expect it to change.

Wow, my dad bought an Apple //c when I was around 4 y.o. and it was kept at home until I was ~8, but I couldn't remember seeing a cassette port. At least I'm at peace now.

According to my experience, in Santiago the food and general bills are pricier and housing is cheaper compared with the rest of latam (Colombia, Argentina, Peru). The most expensive city here is Sao Paulo, by far.

The problem with Argentina is doing business there. Education could be better, and the country is gorgeous, but their business practices are terrible. And the government really doesn't help.

Anyway, the problems he describes are very real here in Chile, but at least we're outgrowing that. There are big bottlenecks in the way (not enough people is english-literate and not-elite education is terrible) but the will to change is there.

MS. McArdle is a journalist with strong insights in tech and finance. Her blog is a good read, if you skip the politics content, which isn't so bad either.

That's standard practice for the mobile plans here in Chile. Such bandwidth for the first xxx Mb, 32kbps after that.

Wow, that's surprising, I'd love to hear about some (anecdotal) evidence supporting this.

Those are two genes that I'd love to have too, but in the reverse order.

There is a lot of people with the "if it works, don't touch it" mentality. MS would have sold a lot less if they had broke backwards compatibility.

It took me some years to internalize the benefits of "if it works, don't touch it", and I currently apply to a lot of home maintenance problems, which are outside my area of expertise.

The article also has something factually wrong (attributed to MS): in the corporate world, the Ipad is useful for discussing documents o presentations around a table, between two or three people, when undocking a notebook takes way more than the time you need to set up an Ipad.

I also made that mistake in the begining, I had to see the Ipad in action to valuate it as the right tool for that job.

My first programming language was C, so I became a business analyst. Some day I will figure why they keep me here working as one.