gabriel34

There is an interesting Planet Money episode about this: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/05/412240643/episo...

I believe there is a misconception on this. The interest rate is payed BY the government to the holders of the treasury security.

This is loan the government takes to pay for its expenses. The interest rate the government pays on these securities is determined by the FED, and it is one powerful weapon to regulate an economy. The government is the lowest risk debtor in a country, so anybody who wants borrow must pay more than what the government does. If the FED raises the rate, the rest of the economy follows, financing goods and investing get harder, but inflation tends to recede. The opposite happens when the rate is lowered.

If the government pays negative rates on its securities, the banks have to pay TO the government in order to keep money invested in securities. The effect is that the government's debt will decrease, money will flood the market, possibly resulting in a bit of inflation, but maybe kickstarting the economy (and your student loan rates might get lower, if they are not regulated and/or subsidized, which I'm not of sure since I don't live in the US).

Multitasking has the effect of increasing perceived workload whilst decreasing work throughput and increasing the error rate.

Through training it is possible to become efficient in doing two tasks seemingly simultaneously, in this case, anamnesis and note-taking. Nevertheless true multitasking is not proven, and switching occurs instead, the trained person simply responds quicker to certain stimuli.

Multitasking might also be the source of frustration and contributing factor to the reported depression.

Of course the documentation work can be rationalized and tools can be developed to help this, but there is also room for improvement on the work of the doctors, revealed by the lack of standardization reported in the article.

I also found that affirmation strange. Pandora isn't even global because of licensing issues.

I've actually seen production code that BASE64 the password of a service account a script needed. Spotted it because the password ended in "==" and, sure enough, the script only decoded the BASE64, no cypher needed. Advised the client and chown + chmod the file. Client wanted the BASE64 encode still...

Ads can be content. The best ones usually are.

You are assuming the adblockers will enter said arms race, which they don't really have to. What is the provider to do when I refuse to render his add? Block me from content? My guess is, given the necessity of disabling the ad blocking to view content, many users will simply bounce from that content. Content is cheap compared to the scarce attention we pay to each subject when we have so much information so easily accessible.

Not if the expected (discounted) payback date of the investment is near and the expected date of obsolescence of the vehicle is far away (mind not only technical aspects, but regulation, acceptance/penetration and financial viability). I wouldn't advise a young professional to drive uber as a full time job though. He might be making enough now, but when/if obsolescence comes, he'd be out of a job and lacking the skills he should be acquiring now.

Four out of 48 seems incredibly high considering the 1.5 year timespan. On the other hand, 48 is a small sample and these cars might be driving a lot more miles than the average car

Robert Klitgaard posits that accountability/transparency reduces corruption

India has one with quite a lot of reports: http://www.ipaidabribe.com/

Relevant discussion from 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9339540

simpler solution would be to add lots of noise by printing your own wellow dots in every printed page best solution is openhardware and software, but printers are subsidezed by the ink cartridges, so it would cost a lot more than commercial ones.

I would think the recent historical tendency is to have more cache levels, not fewer. This would only happen if the cost of storage loses its sensibility to speed.

Ocarina of Time, and probably other games, had some glitches fixed, but sure, you have to ship your first client something playable beginning to end, because this client's media is permanent

in IE/Firefox you can click the middle mouse button to get smooth constant scrolling. Chrome probably does this as well

The best explanation I found was on the book The Value of Tomorrow by Eduardo Giannetti, Brazilian philosopher and economist (in this chapter he had several consultants): If there is a trade-off between longer lifespan and reproductive capacity at a young age, there will also be a point of equilibrium.

Suppose there was no senescence, we all lived perfectly healthy and at peak capacity for the duration of our lives. We would still have limited lifespan in nature, because of diseases, natural predators, etc. There would be a life expectancy, since people would not live forever. Now suppose a mutation occurs that grants the individual a boost in body functions at a young age with a caveat: a gradual decline in body functions after a certain age. If this certain age is way past the life expectancy of the population, this mutation would give competitive advantage to its bearers, with no real downside, since nobody lives way past the life expectancy anyway. This mutation would spread throughout the entire population and aging would establish itself in this population.

The point of equilibrium in these trade-offs would be different for each population, since the environments and species are different, hence why hummingbirds, dogs, humans and turtles have wildly varying life expectancies.

Trying to stop aging would involve stopping or mitigating these mechanisms, which are deeply ingrained in our systems. The consequences of doing so are far from straightforward, both to the individual (if we could not stop side effects to have the cake and eat it too) and to the population as a whole.

In VB:

   if age>ageLowLimit then
     givebeer
   end if

is equivalent to:

  if age>ageLowLimit then givebeer

and you can even mix both styles:

  if age>ageLowLimit then
    givebeer
    allowGambling
  else: giveSoda
  endif

Altough I use it when it improves readability (for instance, with short tests and instructions), I don't like that you seem to open the code block with the "then", but you don't close it.

A negative to this is a proposed solution to Fermi's Paradox

I believe most of Office's userbase doesn't use anything more complicated than excel's formulas and word's styles (perhaps some academyc writers use latex or fields)

Keeping the same standard of living? Am I allowed to move and adhere to government programs?

I disagree, firstly on your call to stop complaints. Anyone should be able to question the status quo. Secondly, I disagree on treating paywalled links the same way "normal" links are treated because this breaks functions of the web. I dislike sites that allow indexing but hide the content from users of indexing sites, like scribd, which contents can be found on a search, but is behind a paywall when you try to access it. This breaks search engines, and this breaks HN. This practice breaks other sites and uses them as advertising spots.

Thanks for this, it sure is helpful I'm not a fan of this data visualization, though. Here is my comment on it for "The tourist map of flash drives" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7465980):

"IMHO you shouldn't do it in a grid, it's confusing as a graphic and in some cases results in wrong representation of the data (which every graphical representation of data should avoid), for example, outliers can be too close to "normal" data, distance between two points is not representative of actual variables variation (sorry for alliteration), overlapping points seem to be different and you can't infer a drive price/cost to be better than other unless they share one coordinate(the worst, because that's the purpose of the graphic)

I'd say your points need to be smaller or you need to use less points in order to represent your data correctly.(...)"

I would add this time that the chart screen size vs price doesn't make sense to me. I would rather have a compound metric for performance/value in lieu of screen size. This would be made according to "weights" attributed by the user against the several aspects of a laptop, so, for me, screen resolution and memory would be the most valued, followed by HD capacity.

I'm trying to give constructive criticism here, because I believe you have something really good that needs some polishing. The fact that you made this in its current state is already applause worthy. It can be better but it already provides a very good service.

If this is a US operation, don't the US law prohibits entrapment? Also, doesn't it seem more likely a surge in public interest is what originated the operation, instead of the other way around?

Agreed. It might seem pedantic to call this article on its use of "forever", but it is not. By setting this in stone you are actually discouraging innovation. Not everyone who promises ground breaking enhancement over email is right, but someone might come up with something.

And if the article's author really meant forever, I can envision a future of effortless communication through PC facilitated "telepathy" or any other sci-fi concept that obviates email. "Eternity, my friend, is a long f[*]ing time"

Care to expand? I'm not sure if it is possible to imagine these dimensions with the "modern understanding of dimensions in physics or mathematics", but it would be nice to at least know why this way is incorrect

Norway could have let its own citizens decide how to spend their share of the money. That would probably result in some spending more than others, resulting in inequality and an overall worse quality of life, even for the wealthier.

Instead they decided on a mandatory saving of the money. This might have been good for them, but it creates a giant State which wouldn't fly in other cultures.

For the record, I dislike tracking, but I like seeing the other side once in a while.

You are right in this case. The only one who must be informed about how the system works is the client. In this case, the F1 team should know how is this security achieved, not the attackers or the general public.

On the other hand, if it is my information you are securing and if I don't have good reasons to trust you, I want to know how it is being done, even if that means attackers also know. If everyone is your client (for example, if you provide public services), then everyone must know, so they can independently audit the system.

Obscurity can be a layer of security in one system, made ,managed and audited by trusted entities, but, generally speaking, it is a weak layer for a attacker with a great enough motivation.

On the other hand, obscurity is detrimental to a collective of systems made, managed and audited (or not) by a great variety of entities. Sure, on the real world we place trust on companies to handle their security well, but that has ended badly in the past. The knee jerk reaction to security through obscurity we have is beneficial because it is a symptom of security issues in the system.

In conclusion, regarding obscurity, the beneficial effect of an extra security layer is only greater than the potential malefic effect of hiding security problems if the entities behind it, including the auditor, are competent and trustworthy. As a rule of thumb it should be avoided or have its bad side mitigated by independent security audits.

There is something similar to this that is already reality: people use a magnet on one finger to be able to perceive EM fields.

We have the ability to turn our senses off when we are going to sleep, so any "sixth sense" prosthetics should be switchable or at least not strong enough to disturb sleep.