umarmung

This is a fantastic talk, thank you for the link!

It covers much more than even the Lockdown article and the questions from the audience at the end are both interesting and lead to even more interesting responses.

Ordinary users only care about cost, choice and being limited - in that order.

Not only are Android phones cheaper than Apple, including pricing plans, but there are a lot more Android than Windows phones.

Finally, even the most casual smartphone buyer understands apps are key to not being limited. The perception is that Apple and (then?) Android are the leaders.

"Openness" as a concept is simply not on the radar for most users, but the consequences very much are.

Fake IP poisoning from the tracker? Unless "YouHaveDownloaded.com" actually connected to this IP as part of that torrent, this seems highly unlikely to be real.

Informative, but strange circular arguments in that article, especially from a scientific process perspective.

There are a ton of questions that Higgs cannot answer already and yet if we find Higgs precisely, research comes to a stop?

It almost feels like there's a split between theoretical physcists and everyone else, with theoreticians saying if you take away our broken toy, you better replace it with something we can play with!

Given Nature already trumped Einstein, his contemporaries, and all since, I think we can be fairly secure that we will ALWAYS having find something new to learn or discover from practical science.

After all, that's how we used to almost exclusively learn before scientists went a bit crazy with maths. These days there seem to be many more models out there than there is good science behind it - at least to a layperson like me. :)

Yes, he's trying to wean China off molten salt reactor development, specifically reactors like the LFTR.

China is basically the only market for fission reactors left. They are the only ones purchasing new external nuclear reactor technology as well as aggressively pursuing their own.

Bill Gates realises if China produces anything successfully independent from the West, then even if TWR functioned and functioned well, it would be a dead investment from a market (and personal legacy) perspective.

"China gets to be first (and Thorium reactor products cannot be easily weaponized)"

You do realise that Bill Gates owns and backs an opposing technology?

Hint: it is not thorium based.

The first MMO TLC (Massively Multiplayer Online Translating Language Collaboration)?

That link is worth the giggle. Thanks :)

America makes all other rich nation's provincials look like Einsteins!

You are generalising and taking too much at face value.

I went to Oxbridge (not going to say which) for my first uni and also interviewed at several colleges, as well as many of my friends also going to Oxford or Cambridge.

1. Neither Oxford or Cambridge university have an open policy to discriminate against privately educated students. This is just a public perception due to political pressure. In fact, in the 1960s, 30% of domestic intake was from private schools, it is now holding at roughly 45%.

2. You are largely correct that you need better exam results if you're from a private school compared to maintained schools. But within that large group, you are actually differentiated mainly by your entrance exam (70% of all admissions), application and interview.

3. Oxbridge has no inate preference for diversity. Academic excellence in general matters far more:

i. Your first critical generalisation is that preferences are expressed from a university level. This is not the case. Every college has its own admissions office and select based on their own college preferences which vary significantly from college to college and can be surprisingly strong and consistent across time.

ii. Therefore, your resume matters far less than you think, depending on which college you apply to and even what subject. For example, for the most competitive subjects, the academic bar is extremely high and in the interview they will be looking for additional indications of the nature of this intelligence such as quick or lateral thinking as well as confidence of expression. For the least competitive subjects, the academic requirement is far more flexible and you can get in largely based on how well you fit in with that specific college's ethos or how much they value diversity.

4. Oxbridge DOES effectively discriminate, not on any illegal basis, but on your "class". Almost all Oxbridge students have a background from upper or upper middle/professional classes, even those from state maintained schools. It is rare to find lower middle or working class kids who go to Oxford. This is likely due to the heavy emphasis on education from an early age as well as the Oxbridge staff, culture and traditions all being from the same cut.

Since this tends to cover a large proportion of immigrant groups, this means you will rarely find such pupils at Oxbridge. For example, there was a notorious article that exactly ONE Black-Carribean student had been admitted to Oxford in 2009. Even the British Prime Minister got involved. Oxford vociferously denied this and said there had been 26 "Black" students out of 3,202.

5. As for Europe, I dare not generalise. This is especially the case since many European countries have lower proportion and diversity of immigrants as well as strongly integrationist rather than the multicultural policies of the UK and US. Also, difficulty of access to tertiary education tends to be much lower in Continental Europe because it is heavily subsidised publically. For example, many courses in many German universities are effectively free, even for foreigners. When things are that different, there's little point trying to compare directly on one specific issue.

===

So, Britain does not do "tick box" discrimination even for the most competitive universities. Quite the contrary, at least for Oxbridge, they will take academic quality even if that means sourcing from a monoculture. Only political pressure has stemmed the further reduction in state school access.

In short, you could say that Oxbridge is almost a perfect example of the minimum you could expect without legalised "positive" discrimination in a university system of a multicultural anglo-capitalist society.

Based on Leynos's well-written post, I initially thought the exact same thing.

Then, I realised that Google runs Youtube, remembered all the recent changes in particular, my face turned green and I puked up a little inside...

If they can mess up such good service when it was handed to them on a plate, I have zero confidence in them in any new endeavours online, especially when the cost is my privacy for perpetuity.

So, thanks but I'll continue to stay well away from social networking sites.

The only thing correct in that article is that the guy is a "first-year analyst".

It's as if he's only read a book or gone through some terribad training and has no idea the size, time horizons and liquidity preferences over which different market participants operate.

He equates short term trading with investments for pensions and makes ad-hoc incorrect claims about market efficiency.

He has no idea about the current market. "2/20" for anything but the very best hedge funds is long gone. It is not even close to being the industry standard.

He completely fails to grasp that hedge funds, unlike most other market participants, have no recourse to systemic help or support. If they make mistakes, if they underperform or if investors just feel like it (flight to quality) and remove liquidity, then can fail. Since 2007, thousands of hedge funds have failed and closed. They represent one of very few places in the financial industry where classical capitalism (ability to fail) is allowed and still works!

The post is basically FUD trying to overwhelm the uninformed or naive with jargon.

I don't think I've ever seen such a flagrant abuse of fiduciary duty before!

I thought bankers were the untrustworthy ones. Now potentially your own dentist/doctor...?

Exactly. Good post.

These kind of events can and routinely escalate just due to fear alone.

It is also often at the expense of specific colored individuals.

Exactly.

Printing is also a fiscal policy that happens to be implemented by central banks.

Without a fiscal backing for unlimited asset purchases or printing money, no central bank is able to act. A central bank implements monetary policy transmission by controlling liquidity. They cannot provide funds to insolvent institutions or be exposed to risk of default/credit risk without backing.

To put it in Mervyn King's (head of Bank of England) words: too many people misunderstand the concept of "lender of last resort". Central banks have access to this facility or are able to print because governments back their own solvency by perpetual state existence and unlimited taxation.

Without a fiscal union, the Eurozone/EMU has no meaningful guarantee of perpetuity nor taxation. The market would recognise this sooner rather than later and nothing structural or fiscal would have been fixed.

Printing can only come after fiscal union. If you have a fiscal union, then you should not have needed to print in the first place since you should have set strict rules on leverage! But if for some reason you did need to use lender-of-last resort, it would meaningfully exist due to the fiscal backstop.

Wrong. The UK and Ireland have never been part of the Schengen Area and have specific exemptions just for them in the Schengen Agreement.

Also, EU Directive 2004/38/EC is not the same as Schengen and unlike Schengen is virtually unimplemented in full in any country, especially in the UK.

Border control is a very politically contentious topic in the UK. So, changes and implementations that attempt to erode borders generally fail, whether upfront or in practice (even if it is illegal according to EU laws such as the directive above).

1. A peg is not a common currency/currency union. Critically, you readily come on and off a peg.

2. Various types of gold standards have failed many times in history, including pegs to gold. The reason is almost always the same: countries will overspend no matter what currency they use - wars/militarism are often the excuse. Notable failures include:

- helping worsen, if not cause, the US Great Depression (US Fed decided to defend the peg to gold);

- helping cause the Weimar German hyperinflation (due to the victors taking almost all the German gold reserves for WWI reparations).

3. Free floating, market-traded fiat currencies solved the core problem of a physical fixed currency like gold. But like gold, they do not, nor can they, prevent governments continuing to overspend. However, they do allow a mechanism to punish them for doing so, i.e. the capital markets!

Unfortunately, the capital markets are unable to enforce their own brand of spanking and consolation in this case because there are no individual currencies per government in the Eurozone. So, it has to whip them using the main stick it has left which are the separate sovereign debts, but cannot console them with lower currencies.

After leaving these individual sovereign debt markets in droves and therefore causing government borrowing costs for EZ countries to soar to unsustainable levels, everyone in the markets is finally starting to realise there is no upside in being involved in a common currency which is killing its members.

Locked in a sub-optimal currency area, unable to raise affordable funds, unable to devalue currency, forced to reduce debt levels by austerity, no ability to import inflation (which would reduce real level of debts) because the world economy is entering a downturn, no fiscal union therefore no fiscal transfers, uncompetitive industries and low productivity due to decades of binge spending, therefore low or negative growth outlook...

This is a painful way for any sovereign to live and at some point something has to give!

Excellent post.

1) you can't have a currency union, without a fiscal union; - correct.

2) you can't have a fiscal union, without a true political union; - unknown, but history is on your side.

3) the euro area is a currency union with neither a fiscal or a political union. - correct.

There may be a way to incentivise independent states to act in their collective interest and thus create a fiscal union without a true political union. However, if there is such a way, it has certainly never been applied to date for the Eurozone. This is the grand experiment ongoing in the EMU.

In a sense, the experiment not only already failed, but failed from the outset due to states choosing to ignore leverage rules in the 1997 Stability and Growth Pact, including even Germany.

The probability of this ending well, or without Germans paying in some shape or form and potentially severely against their long-term interests, is low.

If Germany had any sense, they will be making preparations to leave at any time, possibly taking the few remaining Germanic (+Switzerland) and Scandinavian creditor nations with them too.

The author completely misses the point that programming languages are every bit as much human-to-human interaction as human-to-machine, i.e. programming languages happen to be textual representations because they are "human languages"!

Damned if you and damned if you dont.

All the people in this thread, including Google-related users, are trying to do is figure out what changed. That could just as easily have been at Google or HN's! It could also just as easily been a correct change.

If it turns out it was something HN changed and they did not use or even aware of the proper Google tools available for everyone to optimize their site, then I hardly think any reasonable person could object if it is pointed out to them - even if it's by Google personnel.

Epic Groupon poem, especially for those who do not understand why this is price action is happening!

http://www.thereformedbroker.com/2011/10/30/groupoem/

Here are the first three verses as a teaser:

Gather round, dear investors, and hear all about

The worst IPO that has ever come out

It's hitting this week if the stars align right

But only the foolish would look for a bite

---

For Groupon is now past the peak of its glory

Its promising start a well-known story

Of youthful intensity, vision and zeal

Of crafting the perfect consumer-led deal

---

City by city, Groupon grew like a weed

Positioned as marketing for the small biz in need

Coupons for shoes and coupons for socks

Offers for Lasik and half-off on Crocs

Subversion is a centralised or push model.

Git is a distributed or pull model.

This is at the heart of the processes one may use, certainly within a project but possibly at cross-project or organisational model.

For a glorified search engine, why does this require Javascript to return a static page set of results?

This is just an editor based on the ideas of TeX. You cannot use TeX or LaTeX directly, other than trivial insertions. It can only export to LaTeX.

Where could I download this as one huge stiched image, please?

I remember very vividly some of my earliest extended reading experiences.

One day I found a whole box of old Marvel comics that someone had lovingly collected since the 40s, including first issues of entire heroes and villains! I had no idea what treasure I had unearthed. All I knew is that to an 7 year old, the combination of illustrations (even in black and white) and frame-by-frame storytelling was an incredible revelation! I spent the entire summer going through the whole box and passed them around to my siblings who loved them almost as much as I. This was the birth of my fascination with sci-fi and later fantasy stories (there was a surprising amount of mythology in Marvel comics, especially the old comics).

When I was a little older, around 9 or 10, my father bought me an entire set of thick encyclopedia books. Each one of the fifteen tomes was one inch thick or more. To a child, they initially looked intimidating as hell, though the color and texture of the covers as well as the detailed illustrations on perfectly smooth, polished paper was surprisingly attractive. At first, I would only use it to lookup something I did not know. But later, the interconnections and ease of reading was so great, that I ended up reading each book cover-to-cover! This is how I really discovered my appreciation of knowledge and how I gained strong confidence and desire in using and spending time in libraries for both work and pleasure.

Somehow, I doubt the depth of these childhood (self-)discovery and learning experiences could be easily replicated with any e-books... This is even if there were not so many distractions in modern-day life such as mobiles and the Internet.

Therefore, I am not surprised there is a move back to paper for parents.

In particular, I believe simply the tactile nature of books at the very earliest ages (say 1-7) is important. Humans are physical beings and they relate and respond most strongly to physical objects, even if it is to later discard that physicality. This instinct should be developed as early as possible when the brain development is most primitive.

In addition, a child gains the feeling of control, understands there's a difference between a thing and its representation in words and pictures directly, but that the representation itself is real and is a thing since you can hold and control it. This will then lead to a deeper understanding of the real revolution technologies provide later. Tip: it's not that you can use gestures on your iPad books! :)

He meant the opposite.

But to answer your question: Liechtenstein and Luxembourg?

So, for all intents and purposes, no... At least, not for anyone who is not already ridiculously rich already and therefore you could live anywhere anyway.

Key characteristics of Anglo-American capitalism, i.e. capitalism created and mainly employed by American and British companies, is built around an "unholy alliance" of three things:

1. Professional manager class.

2. Principle of "shareholder value maximisation", mainly benefitting free-floating shareholders (including professional managers).

3. Leverage.

The primary industrial consequence of this triangle of factors is reduced corporate investment.

Other key consequences are:

a. a feedback loop occurs between the factors, i.e. they are inherently destablizing, particularly so in the face of ever increasing financial capital market efficiency;

b. the erosion of capital creates a system prone to shocks, both internal and external, and from the real economy or the financial economy;

c. productivity improvements are capped due to merely reducing headline numbers and making minimum incremental improvements to infrastructure and technology. No incentive for workers or employers to invest in company-specific skills or retraining;

d. gross increase in use of "excess" capital for share buybacks and other financial equity maximising techniques instead of investment or holding, even during boom times;

e. makes central bankers management of monetary supply harder due to the additional leverage use and other factors acting as a strong accelerator during cyclical upturns and a strong decelerator during cyclical downturns;

f. strong social impacts:

f.i. increasing wealth inequality between those who can benefit from the alliance and those who cannot. This is both from the asset side (shares) and liability side (borrowing);

f.ii. the easiest way to maximise profit today is to reduce expenditure instead of increasing revenues, so jobs are cut, wages and wage growth is minimised, work intensity and hours rise resulting in more errors, worker tiredness, forced imbalance of work/life.

When combined with globalisation, the efficiency of the global capital markets with its own problems (Too Big To Fail entities), tax and regulatory arbitrage, and capital flight, the above factors can be devastating to any economy no matter how advanced and results in global inefficiencies that produce sub-par growth and high instability.

These and other historical reasons are why most advanced countries outside of the Anglo-American world reduce the influence of free-floating shareholders and maintain a group of long-term stakeholders (including some shareholders) through formal and informal means. In addition, corporate leverage is usually more difficult to obtain.

What I find especially interesting is that a select few of the most globally successful American companies are well known for NOT partaking in this Unholy Alliance, specifically Apple, Google and to a lesser extent Microsoft are incredibly cash-rich companies! Other companies should learn something from these leaders.

Finally, there's a reason why Jack Welch, the long-time chairman of General Electric (GE), who is often credited with creating the term "shareholder value" in a speech in 1981 also denounced it in 2009 as probably the "dumbest idea in the world".

Yes, I noticed that semi-dichotomy too.

It is like this Forbes author "Steve Denning" is trying to piggy-back his own ideas on Clayton Christensen's central thesis.

22 is the new 42! :)

"It weighs close to 100 pounds." - for that weight, I'll take the girl instead.

But seriously, 2560 dice => 17gram 16mm-size dice. That's very heavy dice for their size. I would have expected less than a quarter that!