ChristianMarks

I visited the Amazon Bookstore in Columbus Circle when it opened. It was evident that with its vast computing and data facilities, Amazon can solve economic allocation problems with an accuracy and precision beyond the wildest dreams of the planners of the command economy of the former Soviet Union.

I manage by not starting a family and by not having kids (to my knowledge). Too expensive.

Unfortunate. University IT departments are susceptible to neoliberal evangelical insanity. When it happened to my department, I decided that I was unworthy to clean the digital bedpans of a destructively competitive, rank and pedigree conscious faculty and took off, never to support faculty again. Here's a rebuke to the smug, platitudinous know-nothings who insist that the university is a business. http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2016/02/proofs-that-un...

It has control mechanisms. What it doesn't need is precisely what you describe: a self-appointed, self-styled group of "leaders" who followed the wasteful winner-take-all, judgmental, rank and pedigree conscious ethos of their discipline.

I used SNOBOL4 in the 80s. It was beautiful for parsing.

Animal ag is environmentally devastating.

Downvoters can take a warm piss on a power line. The researchers are quoted asserting the profound significance of their discovery. This is reason to be skeptical, given the field has a reputation for Nobel prize winners rushing to publish work they hear about from less well known researchers, and then claiming the less known researcher stole their ideas from them.

If you are not sure, then read the article and keep track of what the researchers say. This will increase your degree of sureness.

Self-promotion is suspect in this highly competitive, and not infrequently nasty field. It was known that there was some transport mechanism--now there are details. But I would caution some skepticism, especially when the discoverer trumpets the extraordinary significance of the discovery.

"Mathematics and the Internet: A Source of Enormous Confusion and Great Potential" http://www.ams.org/notices/200905/tx090500586p.pdf Is critical of scale-free networks of the preferential-attachment type, in particular of Barabasi's work. The paper is unusual for its polemic tone and for its name dropping. Researchers will trash each other in private--it is unusual to see this in print.

Much of the article is consumed with invidious comparisons of scale-free, preferential attachment network models of the internet with the authors’ own HOT (”highly organized/optimized tolerances/tradeoffs”) models: “In view of such a simple physical explanation of the origins of node degree variability in the Internet’s router-level topology, Stogartz’ question, paraphrasing Shakespeare’s Macbeth, ‘…power law scaling, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing?’ has a resounding affirmative answer.” The authors seem to suggest by this literary reference that a scale-invariant model of the Internet is a “tale told by an idiot.” This would not be lost on the readership of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.

Its authors spare no opportunity to criticize their competition, as well as mathematicians and physicists generally, whom they regard as foppish, insular ivory tower aesthetes, whose nostrils are unacquainted with the bracing scent of an expertly soldered electrical connection.

Despite all of that, the authors are correct. I mention Doyle et al. because other authors have been critical of work on scale-free networks--this is not new. Doyle et al. warned about the misapplication of such networks to biology, though they mysteriously claimed that such failures of the scientific method "would reflect poorly on mathematics," as if mathematicians ought to be held responsible.

Yes. Many category theorists would find Moggi91 opaque. It could benefit from commentary and more detail than would be standard for a published paper, if the intention is to make the categorical semantics of functional programming with side effects accessible to a wide audience. I guess one could suss this out of Robert Harper's book on the foundations of programming languages, but I was thinking of something more direct.

Not a great deal of explicit category theory in this. Somone ought to implement Moggi's paper on exceptions and show exactly what the constructions mean.

No xy support yet...

That's one reason I use unexploitable public goods, like public tranportion, and go to salad bars not trendy enough for some kid to want to scalp.

OP, do not listen to the moralizers who tell you that you need to exercise discipline and will power. Let them deplete their limited reserves of will power and see how far it gets them: you can change your environment so that you thrive in it. And that beats relying on will power and discipline by orders of magnitude. Quit early and often.

"1.) Doing things you don't want to do, but are necessary for a paycheck or otherwise is a basic part of being a grown-up. Lacking the discipline to simply get such things done and move on is a huge handicap as it's burning loads of time and energy that could be better spent elsewhere."

Realizing that changing your environment so that it encourages the right outcome is orders of magnitude beyond being a basic, mediocre grown-up who relies on discipline and will power, which is easily depleted, to overcome an onfavorable environment. No one should settle for relying on discipline and will power. That's a moralizing exercise in futility. I've had this argument with my stepfather until he became abusive. The result: I stopped talking with him. It has been one year. Reserve your discipline for differential association and for improving your environment.

Then again there are Nietzsche's three terrible truths:

1. Existential: death and suffering are inevitable.*

2. Moral: life is amoral.

3. Epistemic: most of what we think we know about the world is illusory.

*I include being downvoted on HN, especially under the new voting regime, under the category of suffering.

Edit: a reference, with additional clarification and justification for those who dispute the abbreviated claims.

Leiter, Brian, The Truth is Terrible (February 22, 2014). Daniel Came (ed.), Nietzsche on Morality and the Affirmation of Life (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2099162 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2099162

It has everything--except for an ex employee to "open source" a sexual harassment and hostile workplace scandal on social media [1].

1. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2014/04/22/the-githu...

MarketRiders has been providing similar advice to invest in low load index funds and EFTs for some time [1]. The real issue is that if you are paying 2% fees or if the account is being churned (or both), you're getting screwed.

Suggestion: show all calculations.

1. http://marketriders.com

Piketty need not wait for the return of patrimonial capitalism for democratic and meritocratic institutions to be undermined by elite economic interests: that ostrich has already taken off, that horse has bolted, that rising tsunami has already smashed all boats.

"Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence."

http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materi...

Right. In most cases, the only effective way to "steal" an idea would be to steal the entire company that goes with it.

Suppose you do describe some IP for exclusion. Does this mean subsequent improvements or modifications undertaken on your own time and on your own equipment are not excluded?

I turned down a software job due to its all-encompassing, amoeba-like intellectual property terms. Instead, I chose to work in the public sector, which does not limit the freedom to pursue and own the intellectual work one does on one's own time.

I want one.

These also work: http://www.amazon.com/Uvex-S0360X-Ultra-spec-SCT-Orange-Anti...

I cured my insomnia by replacing white compact fluorescent lamps with amber lamps from http://lowbluelights.com. An old comment on this (I have made too many comments here--it's a disgrace!): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6495358

No, you aren't "yourself" in any sense that you could meaningfully account for. Whatever substrate lies below yourself is not accountable to you, and in all likelihood neither to itself or to anything else. Yet it is this unconscious substrate that is somehow responsible for most of what you do, without being accountable for what it does--only you may take the blame. There is little sense beating yourself up for biological processes in no sense under your control, though there may be a biological process beyond your control that, for no reason, predisposes you to assume you ought to be held responsible and to blame yourself when you lose control.

I've witnessed it myself. The solution in my case was to work with my ancient friends.

The Silicon Valley cartel conspirators helped to depress wages and increase unemployment. Universities have relied on cheap student and postdoc labor. Their game-theoretic strategy is cheap talking their serfs into the belief that they too may become masters.

ADDENDUM: downvoters can take a warm piss on a power line.

The apologetics here are nauseating. You want to be slaves. Maybe technical labor ought to form its own cartel and stop working for these companies. Let the executives clean their own toilets.

This system should be rolled out, but not before the karma of all users is reset to zero. This would provide a level playing field. (ok, no comments could be endorsed either.)