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ppereira

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Artificial lemon flavours that you find in candy and cough syrup taste much more like “sweet lemon” than the typical lemon found in North America. It is sweet when eaten within the first minute or so and bland afterwards. It does not taste acidic at all.

Qualcomm | Engineers | San Diego | ONSITE, VISA | Full Time

https://www.qualcomm.com/company/careers

Qualcomm invents breakthrough technologies that transform how the world connects, computes and communicates

The CAD team is looking for software engineers to build the systems we use to optimize chips with billions of transistors.

If you like working on distributed systems in a high-performance computing environment, then please reach out.

A knowledge of VLSI and EDA is not strictly necessary. Strong quantitative skills and/or experience with probabilistic graphical models is an asset.

If you are interested or have any questions, please contact Paul Pereira at paulpere@qti.qualcomm.com.

You may wish to check out the MIT Pantheon project which ranks people not just by page views, but also by the log of birth year and number of languages that their biography has been translated into. With that metric, knowing Aristotle would be much more valuable than knowing Justin Bieber, whose name is likely to decline in importance well within one lifetime, and is perhaps hardly known at all outside certain countries.

The distincion between creating value and hacking the economic system is interesting.

“Think of Alan Turing, whose genius provided the mathematics underlying the modern computer. Or of Einstein. Or of the discoverers of the laser (in which Charles Townes played a central role) or John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley, the inventors of transistors. Or of Watson and Crick, who unraveled the mysteries of DNA, upon which rests so much of modern medicine. None of them, who made such large contributions to our well-being, are among those most rewarded by our economic system.”

OpenBSD is very good at suspend/resume, particularly for non-bleeding edge laptops that developers have had a chance to use. I've had better luck with suspend/resume on OpenBSD than on Linux. I recommend Thinkpad X/T series laptops and have also had success with older Asus Eee PCs.

You have framed this question in terms of your freedom to contract in order to restrict distribution. Although many think contractual freedom is paramount, that is not necessarily so. It may be bounded by other more basic legal principles. In your chips example, it may be bounded by property and competition law.

In property law, there is the concept of a restraint on alienation. In competition/anti-trust law, there is the concept of a post-sale restraint. The idea is simple: after you by the chips, they are yours and you can do with them what you want. Restricting resale also limits competition, which is bad for consumers. Whether this view trumps your freedom to contract is a legal question whose answer has varied over time.

Historically, such restraints were a problem for real property in England. An estate might have been held in "fee tail" to be passed on to heirs indefinitely. Society decided that land was not being effectively used in this way, so fee tails were broken by statute beginning in the 1800's. Your freedom to "devise by will" was limited in favor of the property right of alienation.

Software was traditionally sold to the end user, who could use or sell the product as he wished, subject to Copyright restrictions on making additional copies for distribution. Only recently did this property-like right erode in favour of the current norm where software is licensed under a plethora of contractual restrictions you may never have read (the EULA).

It should be noted that these predictions are not based on the lawyers' pleadings, but on the facts and law sections from the judges' decisions.[1]

There is definitely a possibility of bias in the characterization of the facts. The authors state that for their appellate court, the facts section is uncontested by the parties and derived from the lower court's findings. Even so, it is not clear whether the court's reversal rate is high or low. If low, it could be that the lower court's presentation of the facts was equally varnished.

With some judges, it is possible to predict the outcome of the case from the very first sentence laying out the facts and circumstances. In a famous dissenting judgement by Lord Denning, in which he attempts to save a cricket field, the judge begins as follows:[2]

  In summertime village cricket is the delight of everyone. 
  Nearly every village has its own cricket field where the 
  young men play and the old men watch. In the village of 
  Lintz in County Durham they have their own ground, where 
  they have played these last 70 years. They tend it well. 
  The wicket area is well rolled and mown. The outfield is 
  kept short. It has a good club house for the players and 
  seats for the onlookers. The village team play there on 
  Saturdays and Sundays. They belong to a league, competing 
  with the neighbouring villages. On other evenings after 
  work they practise while the light lasts. Yet now after 
  these 70 years a judge of the High Court has ordered that 
  they must not play there any more.
Even with this critique, I think that this research is an excellent first step. It would be great to use pleadings, which are available with effort from some appellate courts. It would likely be necessary to OCR some PDF files.

I doubt that this textual approach would work for the more technical parts of the law. Many cases are in areas with very few preceding cases from which to train an n-gram based algorithm. While the author's approach worked for certain human rights cases, it would likely fail for cases turning on an obscure tax provision.

[1] Original paper: https://peerj.com/articles/cs-93/

[2] Miller v Jackson [1977] QB 966, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v_Jackson

The mobility between quintiles is not particularly interesting; it is far too coarse a measure. The changes in inequality that we see in the US, Canada, and the UK affect the relative earning capacity of the bottom 90% vs. the top 10%, with the 90th percentile being an inflection point at our levels of inequality.

The relevant reduction in mobility would primarily be within the top 10% tail of the Pareto distribution for income, the dynamics of the bottom 90% are quite different -- although their absolute share vs. the top 10% has certainly declined.

Just like public utilities don't have a monopoly on the provision of power, because, hey, every home-owner can buy a diesel generator. With the level of substitution you are describing, you've made the word monopoly meaningless.

The regional broadcasters for the Olympics have a monopoly because of their economic power in setting the price for their good. Other than circumventing copyright or using a VPN, there is no competitor that will provide you with the Olympics for less money. Random youtube videos are not a substitute for watching an Olympics broadcast live.

This is NIMBYism at its finest. Those who immigrated to Toronto first own prime real estate near commercial centres. New working families have to move out and commute long distances so that retired folk living in Toronto houses can enjoy their land appreciation and sunshine.

Lack of construction is certainly a problem in Toronto, which has a default 10 meter height limit for new residential construction. All new buildings taller than a house require municipal buy-in.

Between 2001 and 2011, the number dwellings in Toronto increased 11%, while areas 30km from the downtown core grew about 35%. You can clearly see the effects of the 10m restriction on urban sprawl at p. 11 of the city's census backgrounder:

http://www1.toronto.ca/city_of_toronto/social_development_fi...

Detached homes and town-homes use twice as much energy as apartments, and people commuting 30km to the city generally drive. There has been an uptick in apartment construction recently, but these units are generally too small for families because developers find it more profitable to sell mini-suites to young bachelors.

Please don't cherry pick an (unmentioned) directive in a one-line rebuttal; try to challenge the comment's core arguments.

There is quite a bit of anger and little fact in this comment. GiveDirectly has been running UBI programs in East Africa for years now. They have an all-star cast of economists examining their performance. Their pilot programs were very successful, which is why they are scaling out further.

East Africa, and Kenya in particular, was carefully chosen for two reasons. First, Kenya has a mobile phone network that makes it easy to transfer funds electronically to individuals and then for those individuals to get cash from the funds at local stores. I wish we had this in the West, but we don't because of banking regulations. Second, poorer households in certain communities tend to use natural roofing materials rather than aluminum, which makes it easy to target funding by satellite.

The UBI is a political football in the West. The Mincome experiment was cancelled because of a change in government. The potential utility benefits from a UBI are so great that it would be a shame to think that we have to wait for it to be politically palatable in the West before we can get any data on its effectiveness. Also, as far as poverty relief is concerned, money really does help.

I did a similar simulation of income/wealth distributions using US income tax rates over the past century. It was a gloriously hackish combination of a Lisp tax-rate parser, auto-generated C actor model, and R.

I sure hope more economists study these methods because the standard models in Public Economics/Taxation are hopelessly inadequate, if not negligent.

A Nobel Memorial Prize winning economist by the name of James Mirrlees came up with a theory for optimum income taxation in the 1970s that is still used by governments today. It suggested that a relatively flat tax would be optimal rather than the progressive rates then in vogue. Unfortunately, his model is hopelessly incorrect as it essentially assumes that the general shape of the (pre-tax) income distribution is constant. Its starting point is that if you tax people too much, they will just work less than their untaxed income earning potential, hindering your ability to raise taxes.

In reality, progressive tax rates alter the ability of the wealthy to accumulate capital, which alters the Pareto coefficient (power-law constant) of the high-income tail, drastically changing the number of very-wealth individuals and benefiting the bottom 90%. If you tax too regressively, wealth can concentrate and even "condense" in the wealthy -- essentially shifting all earning capacity to a few. This happens because there exist power-law coefficients for high incomes that are not integrable. Beyond a tipping point, wealth will just continue to "condense" in the wealthiest actors.

You can find detailed tax schedules and inequality data for the US for the last century. The details of the actor-interactions are not that important, much like molecular interactions do not make a qualitative difference in statistical mechanics. In fact, analytical stochastic models may be easier to calculate, although they are less flexible.

Income tax progression can explain a large part of the variation, but not all. There are other important factors such as union participation, war-time expropriation, and lending terms. Nevertheless, the income tax schedule is important and easy to change.

This is an interesting generalization of my use of progressive/regressive. However, I would not go so far as to say that my definition is a "popular corruption". My restricted definition is frequently applied in the tax law, tax policy, and tax economics literature.

According to the OED, the earliest noted use of "regressive" in the context of taxation is from Richard T. Ely's writings on political economy in 1891. He was the leader of the progressive movement. His use of the terms progressive/regressive would certainly have meant reform/acting in a backward direction.

Do you have an earlier citation for your definition? I wonder if it is in fact a mathematical generalization of a progressive/populist definition.

Incorrect. "Regressive" does not just mean "bad" according to some arbitrary definition of bad. If the poor pay more of a tax than the rich as a percentage of their income or wealth, then the tax is regressive. Otherwise, it is progressive. The word regressive is used to describe the incidence of a tax on a population.

A property tax is generally progressive because the poor do not own real property. The rich pay more property tax as a percentage of their income/wealth than the poor.

A sales tax is the prototypical example of a regressive tax because the rich consume less (as a percentage of their income) than the poor. Therefore, the rich pay of a lower percentage of their total income to sales taxes than the poor.

An income tax with higher marginal tax rates for higher incomes is the classic example of a progressive tax. Since Reagan, income taxes approximate a flat tax more than a progressive one.

It looks like this software breaks compiler error messages.

One of the great features of Knuth and Levy's CWEB is that errors are reported in terms of locations in the literate source. This feature, which works by way of line pragmas, is essential for proper debugger support and, in my opinion, sanity while coding larger projects.

If it is missing, it is often better to skip the "tangle" step entirely and have the literate source map directly to the program source line for line. Trying to "pattern-match" the compiler errors against tags in the source file is a painful waste of time. The 1-1 mapping is quite practical for more functional languages if one writes code in a style more like SICP than the TeX sources.

It looks like this is not a "saturation" site for testing the basic income theory. All participants appear to start with the same income, but the basic income group receives their income with no strings attached. This can create some unfortunate incentives that would not occur had everyone received a basic income.

For example, if you have one group with a basic income and one group without a basic income in the same population, the group without would be more likely to be hired for low wage jobs because that salary is much more important to them. If everyone had a basic income, then all potential hires would be on an equal footing and it would not look like the non-basic income group is more employable.

One way to test the basic income theory is to give everyone a very low basic income and then slowly increase that amount over time. If basic income works, it should be beneficial even at low rates that do not massively disrupt the tax and welfare system. When this is seen to have beneficial effects (or at least not adverse effects), the rates can be increased.

How does liberica taste in comparison to arabica and robusta? Arabica is much sweeter and less acidic than robusta, which is why this more fragile plant is so popular.

It is great to see a review of how multiple factors kill bees, but I hope it does not deflect attention from the use of neonicotinoids.

There seems to be a bit of a language war taking place. The Science abstract suggests "reducing pesticide use through adopting more sustainable farming methods", while the Vox article talks about "reducing pesticide use when possible". The news article phrasing suggests that pesticide reduction is optional.

The Science title is "Bee declines driven by combined stress from parasites, pesticides, and lack of flowers", while the Vox title is "A new theory for why the bees are vanishing". The paper clearly blames pesticides, while the vox title suggests (on a quick read) that pesticides are really only a theory, and may not be the latest one at that.

One HN comment states "It would be helpful to know exactly what's killing them instead of just assuming the reason is obvious." The corollary is that maybe we should research more and wait before drawing conclusions. I agree with the statement, but not the corollary.

I grew up with the schoolyard buzzing in summer time. In Vancouver, Bumble bees and honey bees were everywhere when the flowers bloomed. At recess and lunch, the grass would be a blur of flying insects and a single clover would often be crawling with several bees. Those days are long gone. The fields are dead. Wikipedia tells me that some of the species may be extinct. I think the time to act was long ago. I hope it is not too late.

I have no problem with a cryptographically verified boot process, so long as I control the key or verification step.

Unfortunately, Intel stripped this freedom from CPU owners by allowing OEMs to lock down the boot process in a manner that cannot be bypassed. Soon Coreboot will be all but dead for machines with Intel processors -- other than Chromebooks which ship with Coreboot. Owners will have to accept the bios that vendors give us.

The UEFI legacy boot option also seems to be on its way out, so I expect there will be fewer OS choices in our future too.