c_lebesgue

While in principle I agree with you, in practice N was most of the time equal to 65k, with the exception of the dot-com bubble (years 1999-2003, so 80% of the time; program was added in 1990). And there probably should be something like H1B in any immigration system. Anyhow, the current political climate in the US does not give many hopes for an upgrade. In the meantime, I've discovered Switzerland, and quite honestly - I'm not looking back.

As someone who got "rejected" in the H1B random lottery - yes, the system needs an overhaul. Perhaps an auction system would be appropriate, where companies bid on visas, then top N bidders get visas from the pool, paying the lowest winning price. This would also work well with the idea that companies should first seek talent within the United States. The auction final quote would be a clear, publicly available portion of the costs of getting employees abroad. The only caveat I see is potential employment contract clauses forcing employees to stay in the company for a certain number of years. Currently there are no restrictions for switching jobs on an H1B.

I think the complexity of the problem actually speaks in favour of Varnish. The Unix philosophy of writing software is based on the principle of doing one, possibly small thing very well. And that's exactly what Varnish does: it is a reverse-proxy cache that can optionally do a bit of preprocessing on the incoming HTTP requests.

Besides, it's not trivial to write a high performance HTTP cache.

Welcome to a new era, one where negative interest rates have no lower bound.

In the step 2. you write that you "Ask everyone to accept proposal i", but to satisfy the safety property of Paxos you can only accept proposals from round "i" if you were a participant of the round "i" in the step 1.

The original IP address can also speed up the prosecution process, at least in Europe, where many privacy violations are a criminal offense.

I do not think spam accounts are ever deleted, just flagged. Maybe those created in some absurd numbers. After all they make a valuable training data for spam detection algorithms.

My thoughts exactly: which one is true? A) Amazon is a kind of narcissistic codependency/Stockholm syndrome environment; B) the "horror" stories are exaggerated; C) the job is so cool that people are willing to take some abuse; D) there is other reason as to why Amazon succeeds.

Honest question: do you think that only Amazon has interesting problems to solve? I do not know much about the company internally, but there exist other companies that compensate and treat employees better, such as Google or Facebook.

German EUR bonds have the second lowest yields globally, with Switzerland being the leader. Also their ratings are higher than f. eg. the US bonds. So the German government does not really have to worry about borrowing money.

Nitpick: you need a potentially unbounded number of alternations between existential and universal quantifiers to get PSPACE. Otherwise it is just somewhere in the polynomial hierarchy.

Otherwise you are right, "outsmarting" the rest of the world is probably in PSPACE.

Why the assumption that Ellen Pao was not fired? It felt like one of these cases when an employee has a lengthy talk with her supervisors, after which she is given an option to quit, as a way to save her face.

An evidence for that would be how fast was a new interim CEO found after the previous one "quit".

Sure, it is certainly possible that mathematics can be automated, but mathematics is also over 2000 years old. We are not much closer to automating it than the Greeks were. P=NP does not only break the Complexity theory (which is a relatively new invention), it also has profound consequences to all of human reasoning.

And the Gaussian distribution is an eigenvector of the Fourier transform.

Not surprisingly both of these facts correlate with how fundamental is the exponents function to solving linear differential equations, and how fundamental is the Gaussian distribution in probability theory.

Well, to be fair, the QE program has been stopped, and S&P 500 is still skyrocketing.

There's not that many countries with immigration problems like the US. The majority of governments don't care much.

There is a movie about post-war Warsaw [1], based on Russian airplane photo shoots. The part of the city that looks almost perfectly flat is the former Jewish ghetto. Nowadays, this area has a completely different arrangement of streets, because in 1945 you could not tell very well a street from a building, so it was re-engineered.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aGiurRbQ

Warsaw was devastated after the WWII. It is estimated that about 85% of the buildings were destroyed, and only about one thousand people lived in the ruins, compared to more than one million before the war. The communist government that was installed by the Soviet Union after the war initially decided to build a new capital city, because it was calculated that it would be cheaper to build a new one than reconstruct the old one. Later, people started to move back, and Warsaw was reconstructed instead.

There is a short movie based on a Russian airplane photo footage taken in 1945, the City of Ruins: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx3aGiurRbQ

The general feeling is also quite well represented in "The Pianist (2002)", which I highly recommend.