_yosefk

I meant that it's equivalent in that it's common knowledge; I could and maybe should have used "evidence that ducks quack" as my analogy. If it's not common knowledge where you live, I apologize for assuming that you were demanding evidence of an obvious fact, though the ones who should really apologize is the media in your part of the world that cared to tell you about Hezbollah but did not bother to tell you what they do.

Brendan Eich's donation of $1000 in support of Prop 8 ended his career at Mozilla, making a tech employee donating to Trump an obvious potential career-ending move. It's not very surprising that they didn't. An interesting question is whether their family members donated to Trump what was actually the tech employee's money.

Here you go (there's tons more but it's not my job to answer questions like "Evidence that Hitler was a Nazi?" in detail):

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

My favorite section is "Treatment in prison":

During his imprisonment, Kuntar married Kifah Kayyal (born in 1963), an Israeli Arab woman who is an activist on behalf of militant prisoners. They later divorced. While they were married, she received a monthly stipend from the Israeli government, an entitlement due to her status as a wife of a prisoner.[25] Kayyal is an Israeli citizen of Palestinian origin from Acre, now residing in Ramallah, who was then serving a life sentence for her activities in the Palestine Liberation Front.[30] Kuntar was allowed conjugal visits with his wife while in prison.[31] They had no children. In addition, while in prison Kuntar participated in a program under which Palestinian security prisoners took online courses from University in Israel, and graduated with a Bachelor's degree in Social and Political Science.[32]

Would it be OK to publish criticism of Chomsky's work in linguistics 3 years later when Chomsky shook hands with the leader of Hezbollah, which targets civilians and children in its offensive operations? Or would Chomsky's standing as an intellectual have gone up at that moment because Hezbollah targets the right kind of civilians and children? Which political views should shield a scientist from criticism in their own field? If you can tell, I'm sure many will rush to adopt those views, and great benefits to science will follow.

But... but! If you sell N cars exceeding the limit, someone else will sell the other N cars of the 2N in your "2N conforming cars" in the other possibility, and they'd emit, too! Or does selling N cars exceeding the limit somehow eliminates the demand for the other N?

I mean you can say that the limit is too low, but I don't understand this N/2N argument at all.

Also, I dunno about pitchforks, but if I park illegally, I'll get a ticket, even though maybe the parking restrictions are wrong in some important sense, and I'd sorta like it if law applied to corporations. If that's a pitchfork then it's a pitchfork to fine me for how I park my car.

Do you mean that Warren "tax me harder" Buffet's much-publicized income tax of slightly less than $2M per year is not much relatively to his net worth of tens of billions, about half of which is taxpayers' money from bailouts? I guess you have a point. Still, I can't believe he completely evades the capital gains tax.

Anyway, I never looked very deeply into it, but I'm pretty sure that single-digit millionaires pay plenty of taxes, and I find it fair to call them "rich." I do agree that taxing income much more heavily than capital gains, property, etc. doesn't sound like a great idea.

Dean Baker, a great economist and easily the best on the (relatively) radical left, said (in the context of discussing Piketty's work) that "capitalism is infinitely malleable" - markets are shaped by infinite rules and tweaking those rules tweaks the outcomes. To speak of "capitalism" as a thing with defined outcomes is to ignore how vast that range of outcomes is, and how badly things work without any market whatsoever, which is what true alternatives (as opposed to tweaks) to capitalism amount to.

"That changed on Nov. 8, when the American oligarchs ousted noncompliant professional politicians and assumed direct power through Donald Trump and his cabinet."

Does it follow that Obama was defiant of "the American oligarchs" in his bold support for, say, TPP?

"Marx thought communism would see the withering-away of the state. Instead, capitalism has reduced the state until its chief functions are protecting the rich and policing the poor."

Does TFA imply that things got worse since Marx's days in terms of the absolute standard of living of "the poor"? Does the modern state redistribute less from "the rich" to "the poor" than it did in Marx's days?

Is using the toilet a human right then, and if so, whose duty is it to volunteer to clean it up? Why are paid toilets nastier than paid food? Why not give poor people money instead of spending time (and in this case, a certain effort you can't even brag about in polite society) on yet another boycott? Is there any social institution that is not boycotted by Stallman?

I find it rather daring to use raw POSIX threads or similar, hoping that automated debugging tools operating at this abstraction level, such as Helgrind or TSAN, will pinpoint your bugs. The problem is that the state space of a thread-based program synchronizing with mutexes is too large to explore at a reasonable time. More about this: http://yosefk.com/blog/checkedthreads-bug-free-shared-memory... and http://yosefk.com/blog/making-data-races-manifest-themselves...

Which higher-level abstraction to use is a question and depends on the problem at hand; for throughput computing in C, Cilk is perhaps the best today (I guess you could call my own project checkedthreads a bit of a Cilk knock-off.) AFAIK, Rust developers are more interested in higher-level abstractions than Go developers (Go's built-in goroutines being on par with threads in terms of ability of automated debugging tools to flag bugs; perhaps there's work in Go on higher-level abstractions but the vibe I felt, perhaps mistakenly, is that these are non-problems, which I disagree with: http://yosefk.com/blog/parallelism-and-concurrency-need-diff...)

Are you implying that Bridgewater is a Madoff-style Ponzi scheme? If so, it will be quite the explosion when it tanks.

Which itself is a result of the fact that people will not buy a product designed by people not competent enough to make it work, but they will happily read complete nonsense, and thus there's no incentive to pay what it takes to hire competent tech journalists.

I ported C compilers (badly) and manage people who do it (well.) Today you port LLVM, either yourself or using a commercial LLVM backend generator. This makes Rust nearly as accessible as C (in that the platform vendor will bundle clang with some platform-specific extensions but not a Rust frontend with similar extensions. But the heavy lifting is the backend.)

This is not to say that Rust will spread like wildfire, just that porting C isn't easier.

I didn't mean inventions, necessarily, just a high-paying job where you can retire early, certainly programming is like that today for a brilliant and even a somewhat less than brilliant person. I'd expect that if you loathe spending time on things you aren't inherently interested in, you might be willing to suffer through a few years of that to then never have to do it again. (This is how I thought about things at age 15, at any rate, and I'm pretty sure my intelligence wasn't nearly high enough relatively to how unimpressive my people skills were.)

Honest question: if you're so smart, why not make a few tens of millions, then fill your day with whatever suits you, instead of making enough to get by and contemplating suicide?

Sarah Sharp worked for Intel and apparently didn't manage to contribute to the kernel in a way that would make communication with Torvalds particularly pleasant.

I extend my sympathy to anyone paid to contribute code to Linux.

If you want to bet, this guy proposes a variety of things to bet on: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/16/you-are-still-crying-wo...

"1. Total hate crimes incidents as measured here will be not more than 125% of their 2015 value at any year during a Trump presidency, conditional on similar reporting methodology [confidence: 80%]

2. Total minority population of US citizens will increase throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 99%]

3. US Muslim population increases throughout Trump’s presidency [confidence: 95%]

4. Trump cabinet will be at least 10% minority [confidence: 90%], at least 20% minority [confidence: 70%], at least 30% minority [30%]. Here I’m defining “minority” to include nonwhites, Latinos, and LGBT people, though not women. Note that by this definition America as a whole is about 35% minority and Congress is about 15% minority.

5. Gay marriage will remain legal throughout a Trump presidency [confidence: 95%]

6. Race relations as perceived by blacks, as measured by this Gallup poll, will do better under Trump than they did under Obama (ie the change in race relations 2017-2021 will be less negative/more positive than the change 2009-2016) [confidence: 70%].

7. Neither Trump nor any of his officials (Cabinet, etc) will endorse the KKK, Stormfront, or explicit neo-Nazis publicly, refuse to back down, etc, and keep their job [confidence: 99%].

8. No large demographic group (> 1 million people) get forced to sign up for a “registry” [confidence: 95%] 9> No large demographic group gets sent to internment camps [confidence: 99%]

10. Number of deportations during Trump’s four years will not be greater than Obama’s 8 [confidence: 90%]

If you disagree with me, come up with a bet and see if I’ll take it.

And if you don’t, stop.

Stop fearmongering."

I also find this quote remarkable, and not in a good way; but I recall that Kahneman's studies do replicate pretty well. (This is not to say that all their claimed implications are true - this is the part where "no choice but to accept" rubs me the wrong way.)

"400 pound man" says the exact opposite, actually. "Russian hacker" says focus on the hacker. "400 pound man" says focus on what was leaked.

I thought he implied that blaming Russia for leaking data was in his opinion irrelevant when the leaked data implied that someone at home did something nasty.

I did not feel that he disrespected the ability of the KGB alumni running Russia to do the kinds of things which they were originally trained and paid to do.

Was it their first language though, and more generally, what did they already know?

Don't get me wrong, I remember the people who taught me C++ rather fondly. It's just done really terribly really often.

Precisely, and I use it, so wouldn't want Tensilica to die as a part of Cadence dying.

"If you picked Apple or Amazon, you hit a home run."

Well, sure you did. If you picked Yahoo in the late 90s, a home run hit you. If you picked Intel or Microsoft in the recent past, nothing happened to you.

A good article on using insights as a tech person is Phil G's piece on shorting Microsoft in the 80s. (Microsoft was much less appealing to a tech person in the 80s than it is now, and a much better investment.) http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/money

This is not to say that tech people can't make money banking on their instincts, just that I personally am not tremendously confident about my own instincts. I can certainly make a very compellingly sounding bull or bear case regarding any currently famous tech company.

A great example from recent history is LinkedIn's stock tanking hugely in one day and then Microsoft bringing it back to the original level in one day some time later. And I'll be damned if Microsoft ever makes that money back. But I totally should have bought the dip.

For drawing/painting and animation, Krita is mostly better than PS, IMO.

Brushes are tricky though. Every drawing program has some brushes which are better than anyone else's.

"If computers can be programmed to understand speech as well as humans do, 66 percent of jobs in finance and insurance could be replaced, the most recent report says."

If computers can be programmed to understand speech as well as humans do, probably >99% of all jobs could be replaced, 'cause it's pretty close to passing the Turing test. I'm willing to get monthly payments from anyone who wants to bet until this happens, and then pay out monthly payments after this happens till I die.

TFA mentions ex-Googlers in the FCC, the FTC and the DOD, which are different branches of government from the USDS. TFA also says "there have been at least 15 moves between Google and its lobbying firms and those commissions." The "lobbying firms" probably had people doing less, um, technical things.

"Amey said he’s not as concerned about programmers moving over – and quite a few data engineers who worked on Obama’s re-election campaign have ended up in White House jobs – but top level executives changing jobs can raise “red flags.”"

I speak both languages, and AFAIK neither is nearly as artificial as Volapuk or Esperanto.

Your analogy is pretty precise up to the "naked" part. I've heard pretty bad things about Getty Images from their customers (much more expensive than competitors, much worse customer service.) Naked I've never heard...

You can't program a brain the way you can program computers. You can't program NNs either, im that sense. They have their place, I work for a company shipping them now with hw acceleration. Let's ignore the role of RAM here amd the fact that NNs are not like real neurons and let me grant the point that it's not a vNA, programming model-wise. Most of computing however will not be NN-based because you want to program things precisely, and the brain is terrible at executing commands precisely.

SQL is not Prolog though. SQL, at least the parts mapping to relational algebra, is not Turing-complete, Prolog is. I'm pretty sure Prolog not specifying an execution strategy would mean that your program terminates under one interpreter but not under another, not to mention their asymptotic complexity, which I think is not as bad with SQL.

In other words, it's not a lie to promise that you can specify a query over tables in a declarative way, but it's sort of a lie to promise that you can spell out predicates describing a solution and the machine will find a solution satisfying these predicates, because sometimes it can't. Specifying an execution strategy doesn't make it less of a lie but it lets you write a working program kinda looking as if it weren't a lie.

First impression, could be misinformed, but I'll bite.

Since a hardware circuit is a recursive function that takes a state of the hardware and produces a new state, starting from an initial state (and so is the universe where the initial state was supplied by the Big Bang), you can of course express it straightforwardly as a recursive function, which I think is what they sometimes do:

   blinkerT (leds,mode,cntr) key1R = ((leds',mode',cntr'),leds)
    where
    -- clock frequency = 50e6   (50 MHz)
    -- led update rate = 333e-3 (every 333ms)
    cnt_max = 16650000 -- 50e6 * 333e-3

    cntr' | cntr == cnt_max = 0
          | otherwise       = cntr + 1

    mode' | key1R     = not mode
          | otherwise = mode

    leds' | cntr == 0 = if mode then complement leds
                                else rotateL leds 1
          | otherwise = leds

This is VHDL/Verilog spelled in Haskell (real hardware description languages will not make you spell the old state - leds,mode... - and the new state - leds',mode'... explicitly, which gets annoying for 20 state variables. Of course this could be taken care of by a preprocessor or a macro system, my point isn't that it's verbose but that it's VHDL spelled in Haskell, a bit awkwardly and maybe you can do it less awkwardly but the programming model is the same so calling it Haskell is cheating, kinda.)

This is definitely not what TFA is about - you don't represent the blinking leds as graph reduction, rather, you generate VHDL from VHDL-like Haskell.

This is not to say they aren't doing cool things in this project. If indeed they compile this:

   fir coeffs x = dotp coeffs (window x)
      where
         dotp as bs = sum (zipWith (*) as bs)

...to efficient hardware description code, that's really cool. In general, I think that a sufficiently restricted functional language can compile very nicely to FPGA/hardware (and to DSPs and GPUs etc. etc.) I'm just saying that a general-purpose functional language is better targeted at a CPU, and that a functional language targeting something else is a DSL of sorts.