mc-lovin

Microeconomic models that assume the marginal productivity of a worker can be calculated in advance are drastically at odds with the reality I see

Micro theory is very general, and almost tautological. For example, you can re-interpret "marginal value" to mean "marginal expected value conditional on what the employer knows about you" and then everything you said fits neatly into the usual framework again.

Hence my comment below about the market deciding what a worker's marginal value is. Micro theory makes no claims that the "true economic" (and unobservable) marginal value of a worker is equal to their marginal value measured by some accounting system. Hence why micro theory is to a large extent irrefutable and makes few predictions about the world: if people eat big macs, we assume that increases their utility more than eating kale, and if the market doesn't pay a worker well, we assume that person contributes little marginal value.

Corporations do certainly help spread risk, that just happens to fall slightly outside of the usual micro framework.

Ease the author's discomfort, more like.

I wouldn't be so cynical, but I agree with

chances are that your subconscious is telling you to leave them the hell alone

The funny thing is, what is really happening is that it is hard to differentiate between reality (where there is no real evidence that strangers want to be comforted by us, and 9/10 times if you say "are you ok" and they will sniff and say "yes" then go on crying) and the feel-good stories we read about where a brave soul breaks through stifling conventions to reach out to another human being in need.

Which is ironic given that the author is complaining about how technology stops us connecting from one another, while the original technology that started this trend was the written word:

So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you. Look into it more carefully! Why, we don't even know what living means now, what it is, and what it is called? Leave us alone without books and we shall be lost and in confusion at once. We shall not know what to join on to, what to cling to, what to love and what to hate, what to respect and what to despise. We are oppressed at being men—men with a real individual body and blood, we are ashamed of it, we think it a disgrace and try to contrive to be some sort of impossible generalized man. We are stillborn, and for generations past have been begotten, not by living fathers, and that suits us better and better. We are developing a taste for it. Soon we shall contrive to be born somehow from an idea. But enough; I don't want to write more from "Underground."

a lot of you older guys have trouble understanding...

Maybe when you're 30 you will be able to form a complete sentence.

Actually the logic is quite sound.

A dollar spent on the mars rover is a dollar not spent on poverty reduction. I do think that in the long run, spending on science and tech in general does prevent poverty, but it's not clear that the mars rover does so.

It's very hard for people to face that in our global economy, it's very easy to save lives at very low (relative) cost and yet people and Western government choose not to by spending money on other things. But it's the truth.

The cartoon you linked to is not logical. If I want to advocate spending on a particular thing, I have to at least be willing to hear counter-arguments so that I can actually convince people to spend money on it.

I don't see how you can base a long term business model on a technology that can easily be broken (i.e. cracking the app so that photos aren't deleted after some time like the sender intended).

I guess in the short term they can make some money and transition to some other business model, but I feel like "SnapchatKeep" is just around the corner if it doesn't exist already.

The implication that the powerpoint slides were concocted by China in order to discredit and weaken US internet based companies is absolutely ridiculous.

It puts any conspiracies I've heard involving the US government to shame. You may not like the Chinese governments, but you need to look at the facts here: the slides were released by the Western media, the US has not denied their legitimacy or the existence of PRISM, and there is zero evidence for Chinese involvement.

If we are discussing the benefits of logic programming, I think it's important to include other declarative languages like SQL.

The idea of specifying directly what is computed, and not how it is computed, is very useful, and not limited to abuse mathematical problems.

Not getting a wage equal to your productivity at the margin may be considered exploitation in several schools of microeconomics. If an employee provides value X and receives wages X-10, the amount of exploitation is 10.

And this is, by definition, the competitive wage in neoclassical theory. Suppose there is a group of employers, and a group of employees, and each employee adds value X to any of the employers. Then any employer will want to hire all the workers for themselves, if the prevailing wage is X - 10. So competition ensures that there is no exploitation in that sense.

So while neoclassical theory does allow for "exploitation", it also predicts that it is very unlikely to actually occur.

You seem to be reinterpreting neoclassical theory where "marginal value" is decided according to your accounting rules, rather than the competitive market.

Am I the only programmer who doesn't like being economically exploited (in the formal microeconomic sense)? For me, it's demotivating to know I'm putting forth effort for which someone else is reaping huge value.

There is no formal micro-economic sense of exploitation, except perhaps not getting the competitive wage, which is not what you are describing.

It is also just barely too incoherent to argue against.

I guess some skills do improve with age.

it is.

I read that link already, in fact used it as a reference when I did convert from Matlab to python. I converted back when I realized that in spite of the apparent syntactic similarities, matlab is still very different to scipy.

In matlab, everything is a matrix. The only "gotchas" when it comes to types, is that

  f = X(X > 0)

  f = X(double(X > 0))

Python arrays are not scipy matrices or arrays. And a scipy 1 x n array is not a matrix.

All these little things add up to more time spent thinking about programming and less about mathematics.

Don't think of me as some biased matlab fanatic.

I am a grad student, and I found the appeal of python as strong as those who advocate it as a substitute for matlab. The difference is that when it came down to doing my actual work, I just couldn't do it as easily in python. I am the student whose interests you claim to be advocating, and I'm explaining why I, and so many others, make the choice of matlab.

>The main issue as I see it is that as we use money as a proxy for value, we disproportionately weight the desires of the rich over those of the poor. A service for rich people (e.g. an online photo sharing website) doesn't need to produce much utility to be worth a lot of money, whereas a service for poor people (e.g. clean water for poor villages) can produce a lot of utility and still be worth little money.

That is the essence of free markets. If you look up the "welfare theorem's" you will see that the free market promises to do precisely what you describe: maximize the weighted sum of individual utilities, where the wealthier individuals generally have higher weights.

Ultimately, it is in human nature to care more about oneself and one's family (and possibly other people who you consider to be part of your in-group) than others. The free market just happens to make this fact very stark. Each time I buy a coffee for myself instead of donating to a poor village, I cannot avoid the conclusion that I care more about my momentary happiness than whether someone in that village gets some avoidable disease.

Someone should create something like ListServe, where there were that many subscribers, but I had a higher chance of getting selected :-)

This is a good question. In financial models, one common approach is the "noise trader" theory where some people make random trades. These are the people who lose out to the informed traders.

As to not creating wealth, it is possible that HFT adds value by seeing where the market is going (slowly) and putting the price there right now. Also, it may be able to extract more information from the truly informed traders, so that the market as able to have more information given less informed traders.

That said, I doubt HFT adds much positive value, but as the rules of the game evolve, ultimately the will favor people who add value.

Well the article claims IQ measures the capacity for abstraction, which isn't necessarily the same as intelligence: the best programmer isn't the one who always starts with a UML diagram.

> Claiming that they are not interchangeable based on the difference between pass-by-reference and copy-on-write is just silly.

Actually I gave one more reason.

Python and Matlab are not interchangeable.

Matlab is unique in its expressiveness for numerical and matrix computation, and value semantics.

Value semantics matter a lot because they result in functional programming without even having to think about it, while copy-on-write means that you can pass big objects into pure functions and they never get copied if you don't modify them.

e.g. in Matlab, the following function is pure (and never makes a copy of big_matrix)

  function y = my_pure_function(x, big_matrix)
  x = x + big_matrix(i, j);
  y = x ^ 2;
  end

It's really unfortunate that the data is presented at such a high level of aggregation.

It would be so much better to have individual level data (perhaps with personal info such as age, etc. removed) so other people could do their own analysis (e.g. clustering).

I don't want this to be interpreted as criticism of Bert Vaux and his colleagues: there is incentive in academia to not share data, since you get credited for the uniqueness of your work, and get no credit for collecting data used by others. I just hope the situation changes.

Why is this a matter for the executive branch?

Can someone with more knowledge of US politics explain?

This was a good article, and I think it's important to point out that it doesn't just give reasons why US schools don't use open source software, but that these reasons (especially 1. and 3.) also explain why US schools shouldn't use open source software.

Eventually I believe the economics will change, but we are not there yet. There may be special cases where talented individuals have donated their time to set up and maintain open source software in schools, but this is no more indicative of the true economics than if Microsoft had donated an entire computer lab for free. Rather than evangelize open source for all use cases, I think that we should render unto Microsoft what is Microsoft's.

Thanks for pointing that out, while I was reading the article I was wondering how they could brand themselves as apple-like when they must surely be selling and Android phone.

It's sad that every tech story about China has to be given an anti-Chinese spin, to the extent that the tech angle is completely overlooked.

"A lot" and "rampant" seem like exaggerations. Based on that link, most of MIUI's changes are to the Android source code, which licensed under the permissive Apache license.

Only their modifications to the linux kernel need to comply with the GPL license.

edit: Here is the relevant quote from the parent's link

>While the kernel modifications [to the GPL licensed Linux kernel] are only a small part of the modifications Xioami has done to create MIUI, it does include the low-level work Xioami has done to push things like performance and energy efficiency.

I'd guess that phrase refers to how energy is put into and taken out of the flywheel: using electrostatic force rather than electromagnetic.

That's great then. Yes it would be very interesting to hear how this works.

Hi thanks for the article. Have you actually implemented this system or are in the process of implementing it?

I think the article is much more interesting if it's more than just an in principle idea. Also out would be nice if the article made that clearer in either case

This article didn't make much sense to me. In particular, what was it about the problem that prevents having a "stage" object with a "do_stage" method, which takes the input object and returns the output object (or some error code etc.).

I feel like the answer has to do with concurrency but the description in the article was to vague to get a more precise idea.

I admire Tesla for playing hardball with these dealerships.

The deals between manufacturers and their own dealerships can be arranged with contracts. There is no need for a blanket ban on dealers selling directly.

It's hard to think of a purer example of rent seeking than the protection that dealerships currently have.

I hope Tesla continue to demand what is right and refuse to cut any deals with the dealerships.

I second that, this is very curious.

Unfortunately the incentive structures for researchers tend to reward big claims, both on terms of results and novelty, over careful comparisons. It's always better to sell your work as a conceptual leap toward than a slight variation in a mathematical model

While I'm glad that people from Turkey are voicing there opinions here, I think there is also danger in being too credulous. The people who use English speaking social media are not necessarily representative of the whole population and the fact that people are able to spread their message on social media doesn't make them right.

I am still waiting to see confirmation of the existence of a media blackout in Turkey by the mainstream media, and the more general claims about the current regime are even harder to judge for an outsider.