teambayleaf

It's disappointing to read this thread. Even tptacek, a prominent speaker on Hacker News, exhibits bizarre ignorance regarding this topic.

Generally speaking, it seems to me that much sloppy thinking in the current debate involves the mixture of the following basic errors:

1) Ignorance about biology. Evolutionary biology has been an exceptionally fertile section of science for the last decades, and provided deeper understandings on many biological phenomenon, including human behaviors. The accusers' understanding of biology (e.g. condemning it as "genetic determinism") is at least 50 years behind.

2) Poor understanding of the due process. Calling a random petition to condemn a person publicly is exactly a witch hunt. History proves that it's a very error-prone way to punish someone, and no civilized country accept it as a proper procedure anymore.

As to (2) I'd recommend everyone to read DJB's "The death of due process". It is very important, because it may be you (or your family) to be hung by lynch mobs next time.

https://blog.cr.yp.to/20160607-dueprocess.html

What's the source of this idea that "abstraction" means "combining duplicated code"?

It's coming from the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon's Empiricism. Some people believe that abstract ideas are mostly acquired thorough empirical observation a.k.a. carefully watching a series of repetitive events. The point here is that "to know" is a synonym of "generalization" for them. So OP naturally puts emphasis on duplicated code as a good opportunity for abstraction.

People from other camps have a very different view on human knowledge, and think that abstract ideas can indeed come from other sources, most importantly, from our reasoning function. For these people, the process of programming is to implement our innate idea into concrete code. For them, an actual piece of code is basically a "shadow" of our abstract concept.

Hell, someone really should write a book titled "The Logic of Programmatic Discovery" ;)

A really cool frontend for OSM is https://mapscii.me. You can try it out via:

    $ telnet mapscii.me

I was totally blown away when I first connected to it.

Right. And IIRC Arthur Andersen and Accenture had been kinda hostile to each other for a long time. It was funny because they seemed pretty much like brother companies from outside eyes.

The trouble was that AA kept trying to invade the turf (= juicy consulting gigs) and it made partners of Accenture mad.

Right. The original fork name was "GitHon" because hon == book in Japanese.

The author recently renamed "GitHon" to "HonKit" due to Git being protected by U.S. trademark law.

Japan's "B5" originated from the official paper size in Edo-Tokugawa era. So it has quite a bit of history, and IMO it's handier than ISO papers.

A fun fact is that "letter" size is pretty much hated in Asian countries. Since many poorly-internationalized softwares choose "letter" as the default printing size, while its usage is virtually zero there.

The major advantage of u2f is phishing resistance.

If you always use u2f for auth, you can be sure that you are not fooled by fake login pages. It ain't just matter whether secondary otp is available. (it's just a backup for when you lost a hardware token!)

Except those buying HTZ are not quite "buy and hold" people?

I assume most of them are just doing gambling. They are fully aware that HTZ is going to be worthless in near future, but they buy the share anyway because they believe they can sell it off to someone else before the last minute.

A funny thing is that if Hartz indeed issies new shares, it makes the game a lot less favorable for those gamblers...

OP is not an empirical study, but model-based one.

The paper first assumes that facial mask prevents individuals from spreading covid-19, then tries to estimate how it is effective at lowering the mass reproduction number.

So this paper proves nothing about whether wearing mask is really meaningful or not in the first place. It is just assumed so.

I think the lesson here is "don't be a commodity"?

In this light, PHP coders are real commodities. They are paid lowly, treated as expendable, and get no respect by peers. I think they're going down the same path of "HTML experts" which were once lucrative business in early 1990s.

Java/C++ programmers fare better because (I guess) there is some fundamental difficulty to be proficient at them. So, despite being old and boring, being good at Java or C(++) is still a good business.

Learning Go/Rust is another way to avoid being a commodity. Although they have a smaller job market, employers need to treat you with respect, because they can't easily find another worker with a matched skill in the market.

It's not dead, but just stunned.

Are you suggesting that they should instead say "Hey George, we sincerely feel bad for you, but we can't help but let the mob burn down your house, because, you know, we're at a BBQ party weekend. Also your career is entirely over. Good luck."

Honestly I'd rather be surprised if there is any street cop who do not show up.

The discussion was originating from this patch:

https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/28/78

https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/28/1237

Although you're right that his comment made the coding standard ambiguous, I found myself agreeing with Linus in this particular case. What we need to do often in a large C project is to grep some function prototype against the source tree, and it sucks if it's wrapped like this.

Having debt in your capital structure indefinitely is a perfectly fine decision to make.

We're hearing this argument a lot recently, but aren't we past that already in 1980s?

As I recall, it was somewhat popular among companies to pile up leverages by buying a large potion of their own stocks. The reasoning was the same as today: it was supposed to benefit shareholders because a levereged BS has tax benefits.

... which subsequently resulted in those highly-levereged ("recap'ed") companies filing for bunkruptcy. So that hack was shunned by the time of 1990s. What does make this time different?

I'm always surprised that Java is actually younger than Python, and is as old as Ruby.

Hell even JavaScript is just 9 months younger than Java (both born in 1995).

http://www.textfiles.com/food/recipe.002

This french soup recipe is a gem. I didn't know that I could use "3/4 cup of COCA COLA" to make onion soup.

2) take frequent backups

My argument is that people really should use POP3 (not IMAP) for this reason.

POP3 by design creates a continuous local "backup" that contains the entire history. IMAP doesn't.

Also 1968 Flu pandemic killed 1 million people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_flu

Different perspective. AIDS was (and still is) definitely much much scarier infection than COVID-19, but yet it did not fundamentally change how our society operates.

Also due to its bulkiness, there is a limit on how many units can be delivered per truck.

In short, toilet paper is a low margin, least-stocked product with difficulty in transportation. Logistics matters.

Does anyone remember "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" by James Tiptree Jr?

Listen Zombie, believe me. It was a real cyberpunk novel in 1970s.

The total return (including dividend payments) of Nikkei 225 between 1989-2019 is around -20%.

I don't know any handy English source for it, but I can tell you that this is the correct number.

Note: It's called "Nikkei 225 total return index" (N225TR). AFAIK the monthly numbers since 1979 are available from Nikkei Inc.

Shiller P/E ratio is 24.2 today, which is ... slightly below the level of 2006 before the last recession started (25.6 in 2006.3).

Frankly I won't be surprised even if S&P loses more than 30% from the current price. It is simply not a unthinkable scenario, considering that the historical median of S&P500 P/E is around 16.

* https://www.multpl.com/shiller-pe

The Japanese response was not so bad when viewed in hindsight.

In comparison, Korea's response was disastrously wrong. Their "Let's test everyone" policy sent lots of people into medical limbo ("We can’t let you go because you're COVID-19 positive ... but meanwhile we have particularly nothing to do for you because you're not that ill") and got their hospitals flooded with mild cases.

The mortality rate of COVID-19 is estimated to be around ~0.1% for young people, which is five times higher than seasonal flu.

the risk of death among young adults would be smaller than that of older adults, e.g., at most 0.1%–0.2%. Whether to perceive this estimate as severe or moderate is a matter for discussion, but we consider 0.1%–0.2% among young adults to be unusually high.

https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0383/9/2/580

So although it is not as deadly as SARS (which had 20% fatality rate), you definitely don't want to catch it.

I second this. My experience with many core machines (32-64 cores) is kinda dissappointing so far.

Yes, running "make -j" on these machines feel amazing at first, but you will soon either 1) run out of memory, or 2) notice that you don't need so many cores anyway due to build dependencies.

You are right in a narrow sense. Yes, you can construct a situation that makes "betting 99.99% of my wealth" profitable. But:

* You're assuming the winning probability p does not decrease as the odds Y goes up. This is a silly assumption. Do you really believe that the probability is all the same when "Hay I will pay you 2000 livres tomorrow" and "Hay I think I can pay you a infinite amount of livres tomorrow"? * For example, if p = 1 / (odds), then E(log) never goes to infinity.

If you really assume that there is 1/10000 chance that the mugger can pay you an infinite amount of money, then ...... why not? You can just start a hedge fund on that. You'll gather 100000 people and make them bet independently with muggers, then there is 99.99% of chance that someone actually gets an infinite amount of returns. Now everyone is happy receiving an infinite amount of money.

Yes, maximizing the log implies you shouldn't bet everything. But you should still bet 99.99%, if the odds are a googol to 1.

Not quite. If the odds are infinitely favorable, the log wealth is maximized when you bet 0.1% of your wealth. Any fractions other than that produce inferior results. This might be counter-intuitive but actually can be easily proven by basic calculus.

If you still doubt it, you can just compute it to be sure! For example, if odds is indeed 1:googol (1:10^100), the log wealth for betting 99.99% is -6.67, less than betting 0.1% which produces 2.52.

The link says it's trying to maximize log wealth

Yes it is maximizing log wealth.

Think this way: If you give all of your fortune to the mugger, your capital will end up being 1) 0 livres(99.9%) or 2) 20000 livres (0.1%). So the expected log wealth is:

  log(0) * 0.999 + log(20000) * 0.001 = -inf

  log(9) * 0.999 + log(2009) * 0.001 = 2.3

If you're trying to maximize log wealth, someone promising an insane amount of wealth for a trivial investment is a positive value for log wealth.

Nah it does not work in such way.

Mathematically speaking, even if the mugger can propose an infinite large return in this situation, a kelly better would not bet more than 0.1% (= p = 1 / 1000) of his wealth.

It's very sound mathematics and nothing mystifying.

Edit: A Kerry better thinks in term of a long running sequence of bets. If you all of your wealth just because the game is favorable, you'll eventually lose all of your capital with probability one (in other words, betting everything minimizes the expected value of your wealth in long term). The natural conclusion here is that you need to bet a fraction of your wealth to maximize your long term wealth. But how much? Kelly criterion answers this queation formally. Read the Wikipedia article (or better, read Kelly 1956. It's a good paper) for how it handles the question.

Kelly criterion doesn't work. Your link says it maximizes log wealth. If potential wealth is unbounded, you will still take bets that are positive E(log utility).

Actually Kelly criterion works well, since it would limit your exposure to the game.

In this situation, Pascal as a Kelly-better would bet 12 deniers out of 10 livres (= 0.05% of his wealth), which is a penny.