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I’m guessing the article was edited, because now it says “Daniel J. Bernstein”.

It's not unprofitable if you aren't the one carrying the costs. It's inefficient though, that's for sure.

I could not read it on my iPad in landscape mode. Worked fine in portrait orientation. I don't know why.

That's a fair point. To be honest, I'm not convinced we'll ever find a way to do software development well.

Can we stop with this "programming is hard" business? In a CS program, the programming classes are going to be the easiest ones you'll do. The hard stuff is the math, theoretical computer science and algorithms.

I have extensive experience writing professional (i.e. Not consumer oriented) desktop applications in both Python and C++, and you're right on the money.

Java may not be sexy or purty, but it works and you can actually hire people to do it.

I have a PhD in physics. My adviser and I used say (as a joke, but with a kernel of truth) that there's no need to go beyond chapter one of a given Landau & Lifshitz book to perform research on the subject. In fact, if you were to look at my phd thesis you'd find a number of references to the relevant L&L book but none past the first five equations or so.

You'd be right, if all value production was in utilitarian, physical stuff. Increasingly however we're spending a smaller percentage of our income on stuff, and more on services and immaterial goods.

To produce a two ton truck, you need to use more than two tons of resource, that much is obvious. But how many resources go into the production of my copy of GTAV? Or my blue-ray of The Lord of the Rings? Or my viewing of a show on Netflix? The marginal resource usage is pretty much nil, just some electricity, paper of plastic. The resources expended in producing the work itself can be significant, but they are amortized among the many millions of copies.

Now obviously there are limits. Humans need physical stuff to survive, that's not going to change any time soon. There's a limit on the amount of actual stuff we can make. But there's no clear limit on the value of that stuff. We keep finding new ways to make little pieces of plastic or bunches of electrons in wires valuable all the time.

Most western social democracies already have an overlapping network of benefit systems that are essentially a patchwork UBI in disguise. The system is designed not to go without food and shelter, but the exact mechanism varies depending on what population group you belong to. There's assistance for the temporary unemployed, for students, for people with disabilities, people with long-term illnesses, etc. There's pensions for those that have aged out of the workforce, there's assistance for children. And this is only scratching the surface. Even working people get a fixed basic tax deduction under most taxation systems.

I'm not convinced that the sum total of all these benefits plus the current infrastructure that is needed to maintain, dispense and detect/punish abuse on them is significantly larger than the total expenditure on UBI.

Of course, all the people that you let go from the benefits departments initially will end up on UBI, so that's not really a big win. But eventually they will find employment elsewhere, hopefully.

Productivity is usually value/worker or value/hour worked. There's no indication, as far as I'm aware, that value (inflation adjusted money) is a conserved quantity.

In fact, most of the productivity increases are in industries where the value produced is not directly coupled to the resourced consumed. The software industry is a great example.

What do you base this on? Is there some theoretical limit to productivity?

This is also very true! Usually we hire AI/stats folks and do a heck of a lot of training to get them up to speed on the development side of things. You can do it the other way around, but math is a lot harder to pick up outside of formal education than computer stuff.

Not OP, but I think many companies aren't qualified to judge who is and who isn't a qualified candidate, at least for the first hires. This turns the whole thing into a "market for lemons".

I've helped a few organisations solve this bootstrap problem by helping out with candidate selection and interviews, but many other just don't ask for help.

"Don't ask for too much money"

So basically the pan is driving you like you're some cheap organic PID controller? No thanks!

The upside of teaching decision trees first is that it allows me to spot the people that dropped out of the online course after week one right away ;)

Seriously, I see an amazing amount of people that deploy basic vanilla decision trees (no boosting/bagging, no particular thought about features etc) without any real thought or reason. It has become one of my main "ML smells".

Are we all going to ignore the fact that the author doesn't know what "prosaic" means?

Also, it's the tip of the spear for our soft power efforts. We get more than our money's worth just in agricultural regulations alone.

It's was split off at version 2.6.3(i) into an "international version" that was exported by printing the source into several large books and scanning them in, and then further developed outside of the US. I believe most current PGP versions are descended from the international branch, but I could be wrong.

I write a lot of code like that. Usually I start off with a huge comment block, detailing what the function does, outlining the algorithm used and explaining the notation. Only then I include both the link to the paper and and the full citation.

It's about as much work as writing the code in the first place, but it has saved me a lot of times when I or someone else had to go and work on it.

SKDH is as much of a physics insider as they come. So, if anything, she has something to lose.

Interesting theory. What do you case this on? The lack of FPU?

Hah, I've done this for years! I'm glad it has a name now. I call mine "halfbakery.txt", but it's not very catchy.

I spend about that on a digital NYT subscription. It's not as good as a "netflix for news", but it fills out the gaps in internet coverage pretty nicely.

I think Blendle (or something like it) is a necessary step on the way to netflix-for-news, but I'm happy to wait this one out.

It sounds like it would be straight out of a "Silicon Valley" scene.

Harassment is not acceptable, regardless of whatever cynical-sounding excuses you come up with.

Did they really have to drag the Dutch east India company into this by using that logo? It's going to make things... complicated around here.

I know this attitude all too well. I've replied to a few questions on gamedev.stackexchange with pointers to the usual articles on game state synchronization and lag compensation, and I get lukewarm reactions of "too complicated" type. Meanwhile mr rpc-over-tcp get tens of up votes and accepted answer.

Their loss I suppose.

It's not a "formula", it's entertainment. There is no attempt to quantify any of the variables, or even aim for basic dimensional consistency. It's, to use a technical term, horse shit.

Just in case you are tired of old fashioned fixed function CPUs, check out this awesome realtime full HD FPGA renderer!

http://hamsterworks.co.nz/mediawiki/index.php/Mandelbrot_NG_...