6502nerdface

Y cn ndrstnd wrttn nglsh vn wtht n vwls!

It's never really meaningful to ask "what's the probability of...?" without specifying the probability model with respect to which the question is asked, in this case the assumed sampling distribution of chords.

> not allowed to count points in games before children are 12

So it's illegal in Norway for my 12-year-old cousin to beat my highscore in Pacman?

And all income earned by a US citizen is subject to federal taxes, regardless of where in the world the income is earned. Hence there would be precedent for a US wealth tax to apply to a citizen’s “global wealth,” which, unlike in the case of those other countries, means people couldn’t dodge the tax just by changing the physical/notional location of their wealth.

It is possible to patent a “business method,” no algorithm required [1].

Also, TFA addresses the ethics question in this case, and I don’t think it’s so obviously unethical:

> A lot of middle-class people love investing in ETFs and not paying taxes until they sell their shares, and politicians and regulators seem pretty happy to let them do it. It is also quite reasonable: People who buy ETFs pay taxes on their gains when they sell the ETFs and actually realize the gains, which feels like the right time to pay taxes, whereas people who buy mutual funds have to pay capital gains taxes at random times that have nothing to do with their own investment decisions or cash flows. From that perspective, the heartbeat trades are not an evil tax dodge but just a sensible mechanical use of the rules to achieve the logical result that everyone wants.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_method_patent

“Direct Pay is continuing to process payments as normal during the government shutdown. Continue to make your tax deposits and payments according to your normal schedule.” —directpay.irs.gov. Of course.

That plot appears to show a 20-year-long bull market from 1980 to 2000, so with that precedent set, who's to say we aren't only half-way through the current bull run? (I don't actually have a strong view one way or the other; my point is just that it's hard to conclude anything by reading an S&P 500 price chart by itself.)

> Estimates for YouTube's annual revenue, nearly all of which still comes from ads, vary a fair amount. But many of the estimates are now above $10 billion. At different points, Bank of America and Mizuho forecast that YouTube would post 2017 revenue of $13 billion and $12 billion, respectively. And in February, Baird's Colin Sebastian estimated YouTube is doing around $15 billion in annual sales. [0]

I think that works out to a bit more than $28k/minute.

[0] https://www.thestreet.com/investing/youtube-might-be-worth-o...

The README for 2.0 contains an interesting apology to OEMs:

> The user manual contains some significant errors. Most of these are due to last minute changes to achieve a greater degree of compatibility with IBM's implementation of MS-DOS (PC DOS). This includes the use of "\" instead of "/" as the path separator, and "/" instead of "-" as the switch character. For transporting of batch files across machines, Microsoft encourages the use of "\" and "/" respectively in the U.S. market. (See DOSPATCH.TXT for how you can overide this. The user guide explains how the end-user can override this in CONFIG.SYS). Both the printer echo keys and insert mode keys have now been made to toggle. The default prompt (this may also be changed by the user with the PROMPT command) has been changed from "A:" to "A>". We apologize for any inconveniences these changes may have caused your technical publications staff.

So MS-DOS almost had Unix-style file separators and argument switches!

To be fair, I wonder how well these studies control for the well known negative relationship between firm size (as measured by, e.g., market cap) and excess returns, since firm size is presumably a confounding covariate of board size.

> Take a look at the evidence in the real world (y'know, actual facts, not baseless speculation) and you will find strong indication that larger board sizes increase corporate performance.

So you have statistical evidence that an increase to board size on day t is associated with greater excess stock returns on days > t?

> Like translating a phrase into a foreign language and back repeatedly, I inagine you’d end up with something fun and impressionistic.

This exact game features in the plot of Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel, Galactic Pot-Healer.

Similarly, the human cochlea performs a physical fourier transform of sound waves, and acoustic engineers used similar principles to create paper spectrograms back in the 1950s (check out the Kay Electric Co. Sona-Graph).

“The feeling of having a genuinely clean butt gives you the confidence you need to go crush it in the boardroom.”

A theory... It takes time to create wealth, and a lot more time elapsed before the current generations than has elapsed (or will) during the current generations, thus perhaps it’s not surprising that as time goes on, most of the accumulated wealth around us is from previous generations.

Furthermore, when a person dies, their wealth can either be destroyed/lost, inherited by heirs, bequeathed to some institution, or absorbed into the state/public... by measuring only “private wealth” as TFA does, we don’t see those latter two routes for the flow of wealth across generations, thus biasing our view toward the inherited component of wealth.

This totally depends on how your municipality levies property taxes. In many parts of the Northeast US, for example, the county first sets its budget for the year, and then levies tax by dividing the budged among property owners in proportion to assessed property value. Therefore, if the county's budget hasn't changed, and if all of your neighbors' houses have increased in value by the same % as yours, then you'll pay the same tax as last year. Conversely, it's possible for your house to increase in value but to owe less tax if your neighbors' houses increased in value by more than yours.

Of course you can compare a rate with a quantity. GP is saying that whole countries take more than a year to create one (proposed) Qualcomm’s worth of value.

Have you never compared your car’s gallon-per-mile rate of fuel consumption with its gas tank’s size in gallons?

> If provoked, the agent will retaliate.

> The agent is quick to forgive.

Reminds me a bit of Marcus Aurelius:

"From Rusticus... I learned... with respect to those who have offended me by words, or done me wrong, to be easily disposed to be pacified and reconciled, as soon as they have shown a readiness to be reconciled."

http://directingmind.com/meditations#1-7

> will usually cause an algae bloom, which eventually die and take the carbon they fixed to the bottom

It works so well that this could even be how the current "icehouse earth" conditions got started in the first place. The Azolla bloom of 49 ma dropped atmospheric CO2 levels from 3500ppm to 650ppm in less than 1 my, and CO2 has been in that lower range ever since.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event

> FACT: products liability law reduced accidental deaths in the workplace. (source: https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4822a1.htm) There is no reason similar laws wouldn't work for consumers privacy. Tort law needs to be applied aggressively to data privacy.

How exactly does that source support the FACT? The words "liable" and "liability" appear nowhere in it. They credit the reduction in workplace fatalities to a number of factors, including technology, expanded enforcement powers of federal inspectors, mandatory standards, and the creation of OSHA and NIOSH. They make no mention of product liability or tort laws.

> At the time Emacs was often too slow on my computer (circa 1995 maybe even as early as 93).

Recalls to mind that old joke, "Eight Megs And Constantly Swapping."

Nice write-up, thanks for sharing. One possible typo I noticed:

> Maximum depth of tree (vertical depth) The maximum depth of trees. It is used to control over-fitting, higher values prevent a model from learning relations which might be highly specific to the particular sample.

Shouldn't it be lower values, i.e., shallower trees, that control over-fitting?

Generating convincing profile pictures for thousands of fake social media accounts.

Or photo portraits of the "board members" for the About Us page of an autonomous corporation.

> As a result, most of the work force is in low-productivity jobs

Do we have a good understanding of how this shift of employment from high-productivity to low-productivity industries plays out? Is it even still happening? A BLS study comparing data from 2000 and 2010 found no association between an industry's change in productivity and change in employment. [1]

[1] https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2013/productivity/ (See slide 7)

Wolfram Alpha can do this:

  (density of gold) * (average volume of human)

  -> 1282 kg

And if you do:

  (density of gold) * (average volume of human) * (price of gold)

It will even show you a plot of the time series of its value since the early 20th century.

It's hacker news jargon, with an etymology something like RTFM (read the fricking manual) -> RTFA (read the fricking article) -> TFA (the fricking article), used as shorthand for "the article."

Interesting, wonder what the reasoning was for folding ESC into F11. Did ctrl-[ work, too?

> At 64, Newmark has long said that he is not involved in management decisions at Craigslist, though he still continues to do customer service.

I'm kind of curious what this means at a 50-person company. Is he still handling routine support tickets just for the love of it?

> Why would you use a salad fork for dessert?

Well of course one would have to be rather depraved and unconventional to do so; but I take it that this is huehehue's example of the sort of fun and depravity the having of which he is "all for," while still wishing for a general reduction in the broader depravities of modern living.

Agreed. Almost any meeting is more productive if an agenda goes out ahead of time giving participants a chance to prepare in advance of sitting down.