codex

I've used a Paperwhite, but for most of my reading I'm switching to an iPad Retina mini. The battery life is suitable, the screen is gorgeous (326 PPI vs 212: more than double the number of pixels per glyph) and I hope it will be easier to take notes (possibly even with voice dictation) and fire off emails and TODOs inspired by what I am reading. Most of all, though, I want fast PDF and Pocket/Instapaper in full color.

EDIT: I have not yet tried the Retina mini as a Paperwhite replacement except for an hour in the Apple Store. It's on the way. The in-store experience satisfied me sufficiently, but there is a chance I will come across a deal breaker.

Compassion begets compassion. For this reason alone this event was beyond price.

Having not read the book, I imagine the argument is that grains are carbs and carbs cause obesity and dementia. Most Americans over consume refined grains [1] despite the government drastically reducing grains share of the food pyramid.

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/err-economic-research-r...

Grains can support a large population even while causing dementia in later life. The two are not incompatible.

Perhaps you didn't read the part of the article where carbs are ultimately blamed.

So many assertions--any citations? Why should we believe you over the article's sources?

This isn't useful unless you can also compare the crime rates in those countries (does high incarceration reduce crime?) as well as the percentage of drug offenses and the ease of drug import into those countries. I'd also like to see the execution rate for some or these countries. A prisoner is not incarcerated if they're dead.

Isn't it funny how VCs really invest in order to take advantage of the mania of later VCs or the public. Perhaps that's why founders found, too.

A noble calling it is not.

It's funny that the example given is of Musk reasoning to how batteries can be much cheaper than they are. And yet Tesla buys their raw batteries from third party manufacturers just like almost all other EV manufacturers. So I'm a bit confused as to the value of this particular example. Furthermore, batteries still do not cost anywhere close to what Musk predicts. Perhaps that's because he completely ignores manufacturing costs in his analysis. The price of a sewing needle costs a lot more than the cost of the raw materials.

Reasoning from first principles is a symbolic approach. Reasoning by analogy is the intuitive approach. Both have their place. Intuitive thinking works especially well on fuzzy problems with incomplete and/or conflicting data, where a statistical approach is likely best. Reasoning from first principles is indeed hard, but the reason it's so little used is because it often doesn't produce real world results.

The risk of default in an auto loan is just as high, if not a bit more, as loan payments are typically higher than lease payments. But yes, you pay more for a lease than if you bought the car outright, assuming you couldn't get a higher return on your money elsewhere.

The ability to remotely lock down the car, though, probably lowers the default rate and eases recovery of the car, so leasing this car should have lower "bad debt" costs than leasing a non-DRM'd car, making the lease comparatively cheaper than other cars.

I'm saying something a little bit different, but I was not being very clear. Yes, the cost of leasing is born by you, the lessee. However, the risk of fluctuations in value of the car itself is born by the lessor, for which you pay a volatility premium. The lessor places a bet on the future value of the car ahead of time when they lease it, just as you would implicitly place your own bet should you buy it.

Electric cars are so new that they may be one of the few cases where leasing makes sense; some people may not want the downside risk of buying, and are willing to pay a bit more for that. Battery technology is ever-improving.

It looks like this is a lease, but instead of using an expensive repo. man to haul away the car when you can't pay your bill, the car stops charging instead. When your account becomes current, the battery unlocks. Progress marches on! The Boing Boing and EFF "articles" here are only so much outrage porn.

Note that you really do not want to buy an electric car at this point; leasing is really the only option. Technology is changing so fast that if you should buy an EV you risk holding the bag should it become radically obsolete in the next three to five years. There's also a chance the battery will degrade faster than anticipated.

Note that the treaties themselves are not secret (as strongly implied by the EFF), but the negotiation process is. The EFF has always been a fundamentalist organization, but shame on them for resorting to such blatant misinformation to make their case.

These secret negotiations very much resemble the frank, closed door negotiations between, say, members of Congress and the White House, where deals wouldn't be made if they had to be made in public. Politicians can't be seen giving concessions to the other side, nor do they want sound bites used against them in the next election.

It also appears that these negotiations are extremely slow, which is likely why only the executive branch is involved. It's hard to negotiate when there are 100 factious parties involved instead of just the President. I suppose that's the entire reason we have an executive branch.

There is some evidence that working with one's hands relieves depression and promotes happiness. I would like to see a clinical trial which attempts to measure the opposite effect from Soylent: that removing the food preparation ritual can contribute to depression, or at least ennui. Sometimes removing a piece of the natural environment is not good for an organism. Few suggest replacing all human walking with motorized transport, for example; I wonder if the same will hold for meals.

On the other hand, some people use food as a drug, and removing it may be helpful in a Buddhist desire-suppression kind of way.

See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6720969 for the Google cloud version.

When I interviewed at Amazon most of the teams I spoke to revolved around billing and logistics--which of course do require some algorithmics, but are also fantastically boring. Has the situation improved?

Use C++ if you're interested in writing high level abstractions that resonate with the underlying hardware.

Assembly and C map very closely to actual hardware, but don't have a very high abstraction capability.

Haskell, Erlang, Python, LISP, etc. have abstractions up the wazoo, but there's big box labelled "magic" between what you write, and what gets run. That's because it's easy to construct systems which have nice theoretical properties, but are completely incongruent with shipping chips, requiring a black box in the middle that is doing who-knows-what kinds of translations, continuously.

Intel will never ship a CPU which natively executes functional code, for example, because fundamentally computation is an imperative process. You have information (entropy) and you want to turn it into a useful result; that involves moving bits, comparing them, performing simple computations on them, and iterating. That's what chips do, and that's what C++ does too--the fundamentals--but with more abstractive power than C when it is needed.

If you think that being both "in tune" with the hardware and achieving high abstraction in a single language is difficult, you're right--and C++ is difficult to learn and use. There is no free lunch there. But the results speak for themselves. Almost every single piece of software I use on a daily basis is written in C++.

You don't need to know the accident rate--you just need to know the rates of fire from an accident per car-year driven. Tesla doesn't have a long history here, but they do have 10K cars on the road.

Before humans learned to write, and before the scientific method, stories and songs were the method that knowledge was passed on from generation to generation. Memorization was the storage medium, and since there was no controlled experimentation, that knowledge was always of the form "Once, X happened, and then Y happened."--in other words, a story.

Thus, humans evolved to hook into storytelling very readily--especially aural storytelling. This American Life is perhaps the best example of this medium.

It's important to realize that the EFF is not a research institution--it is an advocacy institution. In other words, the EFF doesn't start off with an unbiased view of an issue and then decide what is in the public interest. Instead, it takes predictable positions on a number of issues, and those positions will never change no matter what the facts may turn out to be. After all, it was founded to push an agenda which was pre-defined in advance of its founding 25 years ago.

Therefore, you should never read EFF materials with blind credulity as many of the commentators on this post do. They put out propaganda like all advocacy groups do, and it's up to neutral third parties to filter it. To be fair, they're not as bad as other groups (NRA, anyone?) but if you read their output directly, it's up to you to pick out the disingenuous parts, if you can find them, and/or also read opposing views to get the full view. Otherwise, it's like a jury deciding a trial in which only one side presents their case. That's a shame, because I often agree with the EFF, yet I have to do a lot of work to unbend their reality distortion field.

Agreed. Age has less to so with it than the tech worker's self identity, which is that they know better than everybody else--including the government. It's a common belief among people with IQs between average and genius, if a bit sophomoric.

Because they believe in Facebook's vision 33% less than they used to?

Simple calculations show that the Teslas are roughly 25x more likely to catch fire in a collision, but I suspect they are much less likely to catch fire for other reasons. So just don't hit anything.

Are .02% of all car drivers injured every year by road debris which punctures the cabin from the underside of the car? Because that's the percentage of Tesla drivers who claim the design of the car saved them from this very thing.

Mass surveillance is the natural state of man. When humans lived in clans and tribes, everybody knew everyone else's business, including the leaders. Today, that social surveillance network still exists (tips given to police, etc.) but in a degraded form now that people live more individually.

People instinctively dislike spying because they want to be in control of their own PR (social status), and secrecy gives them advantage even while it hurts society as a whole due to information asymmetries. Gossip networks tend to distort the true picture as well. This, humans evolved to protect their own secrets while simultaneously snooping and gossiping on their neighbors.

However, living in an organized society involves compromise for the greater good, and community surveillance is one of those compromises. One might as well ask why the Brits accept paying taxes. Instinctively, you hate to part with your money, but you must do it.

There are 6,000 collision related car fires in the US every year, out of 250M vehicles. There have been 3 collision related Tesla fires out of ten thousand vehicles in roughly six months of total drive time. That works out a 25x higher fire risk for the Teslas.

It occurs to me that these fires do not pose a direct risk to the occupants, but do carry indirect costs:

- Firefighters will take longer to rescue injured from the passenger compartment

- The fire can possibly ignite spilled gas from other cars in a multi-car accident

- Insurance rates will be higher, as a collision is much more likely to total the car

Abuse of state apparatus has been a risk throughout history. The Internet has now joined the informant, undercover agent, letter, telegram, phone, microphone and video camera as technologies of surveillance. The state has had these older options available for a long, long time and democracy has survived so far. In fact, technology allows us to implement safeguards which are more infallible than a mere human. A blacklist of current and candidate politicians, for example, would be easy to implement in software. However, the main defense against abuse has always been a system of checks and balances combined with the rule of law.

Linux From Scratch?