gd1

The idea that banning certain information will somehow result in it disappearing has been shown repeatedly to not work

Maybe it didn't work in the old days.

But now maybe the CEO of Cloudflare will wake up one morning, decide he doesn't like your politics and block your DNS.

Now you might wake up one morning and find that Mailchimp have terminated your account because they don't like your politics (Molyneux).

Now your social media twitter clone might be banned by the Apple/Google store because they don't like what people are posting on it (Gab). As if you're a publisher... which you're not under section 230...

Now your GoFundme gets pulled if whatever leftist running GoFundme decides they don't like you.

Now the payment companies won't process your payments (too many examples to name).

Now, despite being the fourth largest newspaper in the country, your twitter account will be disabled indefinitely for posting "hacked" "russian disinformation" that turns out to be neither hacked nor disinformation. And we find out after the election that the Attorney General of Delaware has been investigating this matter for over a year.

Now some dipshit moderator on Hacker News will shadowban you permanently on a whim.

Your google docs will be blocked for violating the terms of service.

Youtube will demonetize you.

There is nowhere to hide from the dystopia that every fucking retarded left-winger here is so eager to embrace. It's like being in the middle of the red scare, but everyone says they're ok with telephone companies listening to the bad people's conversations and disconnecting their phone lines if they mention communism. Because, you know, they're "private companies" or something. The only cold comfort is that it will surely be used against them one day.

AnD wHy dId PeOpLe vOtE fOr a RacIst??!!

What about the postal service then? That is a common carrier. Never mind being bombarded with bigotry, people can bombard you with literal bombs using the postal service, but hey if some kids are shitposting memes on 8chan... well we have to shut down that service altogether.

Isn't a possible answer that people's (net of tax) incomes are flat, but they can still afford to increase consumption because these services are government subsidized (directly or indirectly)?

KDB doesn't support unicode text.

Unicode (from 2011):

http://code.kx.com/wiki/Cookbook/Unicode

No, I do know that, and it is completely irrelevant. It doesn't matter why the artic was seven degrees warmer, all that matters is that it was seven degrees warmer.

And there was no methane burp or PETM was there?

Given the way he has handled his taxes, it is safe to say that he would make a poor accountant anyway.

It's not so much distrust of middlemen, as it is distrust of anonymous middlemen. And also automated middlemen. People are happier getting shafted by a person they can see than a bot they can't. Otherwise, they would be hurling abuse at Apu down at the Kwik-e-mart when he charges them 30% extra for a quart of milk just because he bridges time (11pm) and space (down on the corner) to provide liquidity and make it convenient for them.

Part of this is also algorithm aversion (even here on HN) - watch how people are reacting to Tesla autopilot crashes. There is a lot of tin foil stuff about 'algos gone haywire', but I can tell you now that humans fat fingering in the market were both more common and more deadly.

"By who? NASA? The people the… Hang on a minute. No, no, see this is quite serious. But can I just – just one thing. NASA, NASA… The people that landed men on the moon?"

Can anyone explain to me what is happening in this bit?

It's either:

a) Brain Cox doesn't know that NASA is responsible for GISTEMP and is completely incredulous at the mention of NASA (The people that landed men on the moon?), as if they aren't relevant to the discussion.

or

b) Brian Cox is aware that NASA maintains one of the major surface temperature datasets, but thinks that it is completely beyond the pale to question any of the decisions (adjustments, station selection) that go into the construction of GISTEMP, because they are NASA (The people that landed men on the moon!!!).

So which is it? Is he clueless, or just a dick?

It's perfectly possible to believe that society should accept homosexuality and also be against gay marriage. It's a complex issue. 'Marriage' is a religious ceremony, and freedom of religion and association is a thing. If the Christians don't want to let the gays join their club and do their funny little ceremony, then so be it. Any change needs to be driven by the Pope and the church itself, not enforced by the state.

That is completely distinct from the concept of a legal union as defined by the state, which should be available to all consenting adults. Hell, as a mathematical type myself, if you can get it working in 2 dimensions you should be able to generalize to n dimensions, so why not legalize a union between any n consenting sentient beings while we're at it?

The bigger mystery is why any non-christian gay people would care...?? If you're not Christian, you shouldn't care about a religious 'marriage', only civil unions. If you are Christian, you should take it up with your Church and work on change from within. I mean how is it going to work? If you're a Christian gay and you feel hurt and not included because your faith denies you the right to a religious marriage, are you really going to feel any more included when the state kicks the door down and forces them to accept you? They have to decide to accept you on their own.

I just don't get the whole issue.

Selection pressure may well have shifted towards C4 in the future if we hadn't come along and been kind enough to dig up some fossilized carbon and put it back into circulation.

I wouldn't say you're paying the homeless for the street cleaning service.

I certainly would. Are you arguing just because the government is interposed in the process that it is no longer a service you are paying for?

Ok, let's try a different angle. Imagine a world where financial markets aren't electronic and brokers don't exist. You have 5 Apple shares that have a fair value of $500. The only way to sell your shares in this fantasy world is to physically find someone who wants them. Maybe you call people on the phone, maybe you spam some e-mails. You get the full $500 if you find a buyer, but it takes labour and time. The labour is costing you, since you could be doing something productive that you are more skilled at. And the time is costing you, because you want the $2500 now to pay the rent, and if Apple shares plunge you could be in trouble!

So I, for the first time ever, get the idea to set up a lovely looking shop on the corner and offer to buy them from you for $499 each, and I'll handle the rest. You come in with your share certificate, we shake hands, make small-talk, exchange money. Surely you agree this is a service?

So I am slightly baffled. All that has changed is that the process outlined above has been made electronic, and now you claim it isn't a service? Do shops selling shit on ebay no longer qualify as services?

They act for their own profit

Lol, as opposed to all the other actors in the economy who provide a service.

and the fact that they make the spread smaller is a bit of a side effect

It's not 'a bit of a side effect', it is what they have to do to earn fills or they will be undercut by their competition. Narrowing the spread is literally what a market maker is paid to do. It is their reason for existence. It isn't a 'side effect'. If you make a spread narrower than your competition, you steal his customers. Otherwise you don't trade and you don't make any money and you are out of business.

Why call that a service?

It is a service. A very useful one. They offer, for a specified price, to sell (or buy) a financial instrument to (or from) you.

No one forces you to use it. If you don't want to, and think you can do better, you can take your chances and place a limit order in the book instead.

So like all services, it is completely optional, costs you money (to cross the spread), and provides you a benefit (immediate execution and certainty of price).

I suspect what you are struggling with, is that you don't realise that risk transferral is a benefit. Take for example, the dairy farmer who sells his milk to a company (a middleman) that transports it, pasteurizes it, bottles it and on-sells it to a supermarket chain. In this case, you would probably tell me that you can see what service they provide - they add value by pasteurizing and bottling the milk, which they specialize in. Which is true. But there is a hidden value too - they take risk away from the farmer. The milk could spoil, the trucks could breakdown, the vats be contaminated, the supermarkets cancel their orders. All of these are risks that the farmer would have to bear if the farmer wanted to bottle their own milk, take it to a market and sell it. Part of the service provided is to take risk away from the farmer and be paid for it.

That is all a market maker does. They offer you the opportunity to dispose of your risk (the risk that the financial instrument you hold may move against you in the time it takes you to find a buyer or seller) instantly by paying a very (very) small fee to do so.

Interesting.

Compare the chart in the linked article with Hansen's own assessment that he put out in 2005 (third page): http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/2005/Crichton_20050927.pdf

How do you reconcile those two? A lot seems to come down to centering decisions?

Scenario A I believe is closest to the emissions path we are on.

Indeed, but it is really only the system response we are interested in. As you admit, a clear causal explanation for how a single input forcing is increasing doesn't automatically get us to a position where we can predict the overall system response. Or predict whether a given system response will have some positive or negative second order effect.

We have a clear causal physical explanation that eating fat should make you fatter right? Are you willing to say that? Or would you qualify yourself - 'eating more fat will make you fatter in the absence of negative feedbacks (perhaps the fat reduces your appetite more than carbs or protein?) and assuming that all other inputs (exercise level etc) remain constant'.

Really? There is 'literally nothing wrong' with stonewalling FOI requests, stacking peer review to prevent opposing scientists from publishing, or splicing temperature data onto the end of a proxy chart to hide the fact the proxy is diverging?

Ok then.

There is a very clear causal explanation for why greenhouse gases do what they do

I'm sorry, but it doesn't work that way. We have very clear chemistry/physics on the composition of food, how it is digested, etc. But nutrition science is still an embarrassing shitshow.

We have clear physics on how neurons fire, etc. but neuroscience is still in its infancy and psychology... well, it is psychology.

Earth's climate is a large scale multi-variable control system with thousands of feedback loops. A good understanding of the physics that drive a single forcing doesn't really tell us shit I'm afraid. It is just as open to manipulation as these other fields.

There isn't evidence in either of those articles that Thiel influenced the nature of the claims to prevent insurance from triggering. Just speculation around that.

Be careful, you probably shouldn't just make shit up about someone and then pretend it is true.

To illustrate how this sort of intermeddling tainted the processes in this case

Do you have any evidence that the 'scorched-earth' came from Thiel and not Hogan? If not, you'd best withdraw your 'illustration'.

Thiel intervened not to win Bollea more money (indeed, he may end up getting less), but to pay Bollea off so that the case would be about hurting Gawker more than benefiting Bollea, which is what Thiel wanted.

Do you have any evidence of this at all?

No. There is no need for statistics when you have the individual at your disposal and work with them day to day. Treat them as a human. There is no need to make vague statistical guesses, the data you gain by actually interacting with them is far superior, no? It would be like cutting John Stockton from your basketball team because he is short and white, there is no need to make statistical judgements like that when you can watch the actual player on the actual basketball court and assess them properly.

"The article already states that they found a very clear correlation"

Oh well that makes it ok then. If I find a clear correlation between say black skin and employee underperformance, I guess I can just go right ahead and sack individuals based on some statistical association discovered in a population they happen to belong to.

What the fuck is wrong with you people? I mean the entire lesson of not being racist or not being sexist or whatever is that it isn't ok to judge individuals by the population they happen to belong to. I mean guess what, black people are more likely to be criminals. Women are less likely to be coders. White people are less likely to play basketball well. These are statistical facts, though it seems awkward to say them. But that's ok, because the entire point is that you assess each individual you meet in life on their own merits, not some statistical generalization.

And somewhere along they way, you've missed this point. You don't get to assume that an individual is a shitty employee because they are a shitty LoL player just because you have some correlation to go on.

And anti-GMO. Anti-nuclear. Organic food enthusiasts. Anti modern farming. Naturopathy and homeopathy believers. The type of people who think that global warming causes more hurricanes for example.

Start coding in lisp

APL had specialized keyboards.

Having worked with both Oracle and KDB, the thing to understand is that KDB (or K or Q) is a fully fledged language... you can do whatever you like really. If you want something distributed you just design something yourself and build it. It's not like Oracle where it is all opaque and buried in query plans and the like.

Well said.

Just another piece of shit for the warmlist.

http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm

You can spin it however you want, but if you are keeping something of worth artificially scarce when it is in fact infinitely abundant, you are deliberately impoverishing the human race. The rules of our economy, supply and demand, break down when supply is infinite... but that is a problem with the economic system that needs to be fixed (perhaps a state funded patronage model?), it's not something that pirates need to feel guilty about. Copyright law reduces the net wealth of the world. It is just plain evil.

You are exactly right. My favourite is when resistance to APL-family languages comes from people who claim to be polyglots, and you ask them which languages and they list: C, C#, java, javascript, VB, ruby, python etc. Those are all really the same language with slightly different wording and details. Like german and english. APL-family is like Mandarin or Japanese. Lisp is like Latin (in fact lisp is really a mechanism to author your own language with s-exprs). Obviously, these languages won't be comprehensible to you until you put the effort into learning the abstractions... this isn't like transitioning from C++ to Java where you can broadly carry the same concepts over.

There is nothing difficult about reading these languages to people who use them, anymore than it is difficult for a musician to read sheet music. In fact, APL languages have less ambiguous parsing and precedence rules which I find make them easier to read.

KDB with a 2GB addressable RAM limit is almost pointless. It was good that they were at least trying to encourage new developers, but you could never build anything serious with that limitation.

Ask the commenter one down from me, 'wsfull, he knows what I'm talking about!

I am aware of J, but it seems to me that J is comparable to K, not Q/KDB+. If you want a python comparison, then K is python, and Q/KDB+ is more like pandas. Except much, much quicker, and more powerful, but without as many tools and packages to support it. But that could be fixed - those tools and packages don't exist because the community isn't there, because it is (sadly) closed source.