SquishyPanda23

Which partly explains Wikipedia's political stance.

I'm curious to hear what you think Wikipedia's political stance is?

If somebody talking about their disability triggers you into such a strong political reaction, then maybe consider the possibility that you have let your own identity politics take too much control over your life.

Also i have a distaste of the author listing their "disabilities" in their twitter bio.

People generally prefer disabled people not to talk about their disabilities or be public about them. But this sort of openness is incredibly useful. It's the internet and it's almost 2021. Let people talk about what they want to without being the internet police.

The license wasn't changed. But yes, generally you can make changes to MIT code that aren't released under the MIT license.

It's definitely the case that at a given snapshot of the repository which has copyrighted code owned by someone else the copyright notice has to be there at that same revision.

This isn't in the license. Where is this laid out?

I'm just curious, is Microsoft actually in violation of the MIT license here?

All future changes to this repo are copyright Microsoft, so Microsoft's copyright should be in the statement.

Arguably there should be an additional statement indicating that LesnyRumcajs holds copyright to bits of code that Microsoft hasn't changed.

But

(1) exactly which bits have LesnyRumcajs's copyright would have to be verified by examining source control history. Since LesnyRumcajs's copyright statement is visible on any commit where LesnyRumcajs holds copyright, this setup makes actually makes it easy to verify which portions LesnyRumcajs has copyright claims on.

(2) Including LesnyRumcajs's copyright statement in repo history seems to be all that the MIT license requires. The license doesn't forbid there being another more easily accessible copyright notice that doesn't list all copyright holders. It only requires that LesnyRumcajs's statement be included in all copies of the software, which it currently is.

Yes of course it's in dispute. It's so dominant a dispute in intelligence research that it's hard to imagine anyone being familiar with research on IQ and not knowing that it's in dispute.

IQ tests are maybe ok at doing population-level correlations, but not at predicting the success of any given individual. Tons of things are correlated with intelligence, and IQ has the virtue that it's easy to measure. So it has uses for things like research studies.

But as an actual filter when you care about performance it's not great. Things like high school GPA are easier to measure and more predictive of college success.

This is a very well studied field, just do a Google search

It's not sufficient that a metric be objective. The student's astrological sign is objective. But it's not a useful measure of college readiness.

Standardized test scores do very little to predict college success when controlling for other variables. And they're trivial to game.

They're a relic of back when people believed in IQ tests were useful selection criteria. Maybe there will be standardized tests in the future that are more useful, but we don't have those yet.

It's usually not obvious where to put the seams ahead of time so you can cut them when you need to split into microservices.

Plus keeping the API boundaries clean costs time and resources, and it's tempting to violate them just to launch this one feature. This extra discipline doesn't have any payoff in the short term, and it has unknown payoff in the long term because you're not sure you drew the boundaries ahead of time anyway.

So I think in practice what happens is you create a monolith and just eat the cost of untangling it when the team gets too big or whatever.

I'm sorry I've hurt your feelings.

I'm sorry I've hurt your feelings.

To be readable, usable.

Go doesn't particularly value readability or usability. For example, the short variable name convention makes it harder to read code you're unfamiliar with, and there are a number of noticeable usability shortcomings, some of which are mentioned in the article.

I think Go's design goals were really to (1) reduce compilation time, which explains why Go has human programmers do work that compilers do in other languages, (2) be statically typed and compiled, so you can use it conveniently for microservices, and (3) have syntax somewhat similar to Python.

I think of Go as the successor to Java. Go is to Python as Java was to C++. That, plus the integration with many libraries is why it's taken off in some niches.

Haha, no problem. I do that a lot too :)

You can't shoot someone in the US for swinging something at your head. Otherwise all bar fights would end in gun violence like in a cheesy Western film.

nobody except the sender, the receiver and the service provider can read the messages

E2EE means the service provider cannot read the messages.

Only the sender and receiver can.

If people are willing to pay money for a service, that service is by definition valuable.

This is only true if you define "value" to mean "people are willing to pay money for it."

But that's a useless and circular definition. It's only tolerated because assuming that money is a proxy for value was useful for making crude models in economics.

From the context, I think they were talking about discovery, not whether the books are available for purchase on Amazon.

Personally I don't think I've ever become aware of an interesting book via Amazon, but I've also never used it for discovery. Certainly you have to troll through a lot of nonsense results even when you have a good idea of what you're looking for.

Ha sorry, I just realized you must have meant Watergate. I misread your original comment as saying it was about the current sitting president.

We've already seen a sitting US president hire intelligence agents to bug his enemies and political rivals,

Do you have a source for this claim?

Essentially the government has built a surveillance state by outsourcing it to private enterprise.

Well, yes, that's essentially the whole point of silicon valley. The government and military fund the creation of startups that have tactical value. Those businesses become self-funding and improve the US economy, which also has military value since a robust economy is harder to attack. This has been explored in a few places, e.g. [0], [1].

But it's not like any of this was secret. The off-loading of government operations to private industry, combined with the lobbying for reduced regulations on private industry effectively gives the government carte blanche with the added bonus of plausible deniability.

Whether or not these trends are good has been debated for half a century in the US.

[0] https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-ci...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

The endless virtue signalling is so tiresome.

And yet you felt the need to signal your tribe while trying to shut down someone's speech.

Is it possible that you're autistic? There are lots of online tests you can take. If so, it would explain why you have a hard time finding people to connect with.

If you are, then you'll probably get along best with other autistic people. And you'll have to put effort into socializing, which is a learned skill just like CS.

There should be several autistic people in any CS department, and also in math and physics.

The word "happiness" refers both to the temporary emotion and a long-term state of being satisfied with your life. Nowadays the long term state is often called "life satisfaction" in research.

Someone in a gulag would have low life satisfaction.

The original lottery winners vs accident victim study attempted to measure the long term state: https://www.talenteck.com/academic/Brickman-Coates-Janoff-19...

That study isn't the final word though. Other studies have found that winning the lottery increases life satisfaction, while still others have found that they don't.

Yes, that's true. If you project down to a linear relationship, more IQ is associated with more income.

Most of the data you see on that stop around an IQ of 125, which is about the average IQ of a PhD in the US.

But there's also a lot of research on people with very high iq and the links with depression, anxiety, loneliness etc.

If you want the easiest life possible, I don't think you want to maximize IQ. I think you want to go high enough that you're eligible for the high paying jobs, but not so smart that you feel like the other people in those jobs are idiots.

I find this to be an odd essay.

It's trivially easy to come up with new ideas. Just take any existing idea and perturb in a random direction. With high probability it will be new.

Drugs and some mental disorders make it very easy to do this. The problem is, new ideas aren't very valuable. What is valuable is intelligently generating new ideas that take into account what came before. And for that you need intelligence and education.

There is a kind of folk psychology in tech that emphasizes tinkering and working on projects. But almost all projects are bad. The reason tinkering produces results at a population level is because you have N agents randomly searching the terrain.

That is fine if you're interested only in population effects, like VCs typically are. Then you can just watch for the random ideas that catch on and bet on them.

But if you're going to decide whether you'd rather be smart or be a random-walking tinkerer, the choice is obvious. It's vastly better to be smart because most tinkerers fail and never have anything to show for it.

Being even a little clever—and that's the best I can claim—is living life on easy mode

That is probably true about being a little clever, but being really smart is not easy in the general case. Really smart people often share few ideas and interests with others and spend much of their lives lonely and misunderstood.

the reason they were so much brighter was (in part) exactly because of what made them initially seem dim

The causality also goes the other way. Very smart people see their limitations more clearly and so tend to be humbler about what they know.

They realize they can learn from others and so ask a lot of questions that others might feel foolish asking.

There is an element of truth to this, but they are easier to use than explain.

Part of the hardness comes from people wanting to use monads as an entry point to category theory.

Ah okay, that makes sense then. Sorry about my confusion.

I don't know the motives of the original poster. Since the article was about how the top 10% own ~ 90% of the stock, I assumed the relevance of the income tax figure was that it was related to its impact on wealth inequality.

If you’re claiming people who are in alignment with official tax government policy (again in the spirit not just the letter of the law) are free riders, then we are back to who should assume the responsibility for paying. As stated in my previous post.

Sure, I agree with this assessment up to first order. But this is a bit slippery because of second order effects where you can pay to have a favorable tax code created (or at least pay to substantially increase the odds of such a policy being created).

Taking the standard deduction or simply claiming straightforward deductions like the mortgages interest deduction is not tax avoidance when done in the spirit of the law, which, anecdotally, is the case for most middle to low income filers.

I agree with this.

I find it extremely implausible that majority of people who don’t pay income tax are doing so as a result of complex financial schemes.

For the short-term Covid-related spike of people not paying due to unemployment and temporary tax credits, sure I agree. In general case, though, the schemes don't have to be very complex and you can just pay people to set them up for you.

Also, the number or percentage of people who don't pay income tax is an indicator of how easy tax avoidance has gotten. That's why that number is quoted. But since the distribution of wealth is so skewed, what really matters in the free rider context is the amount of money not paid into the system.

And for this I don't think it's at all implausible (and is in fact consistent with what we know) to say that the wealthiest Americans pay extremely low income tax rates because of tax avoidance. (Here I am including the creation of favorable tax policy as tax avoidance if it's contrary to the spirit of the US's policy of progressive income tax.)

we are talking about who assumes responsibility for paying for the benefits of society/governance

This has essentially already been decided. The topic is tax avoidance, which I compared to skipping out on a bill that ought to be paid.

It's a pretty standard free rider problem. It doesn't change the problem to point out that the free rider benefits from the ride (which, of course they do) or that they benefit more from it than others, or that they paid unrelated bills.