gphil

Nope, you're right. I can't argue the opposite and I'm not. I'm just sick of all the generalizations that get made on HN with no evidence or supporting data.

> The likely truth is that most women would rather work as nurses and teachers than as programmers and engineers.

How could you possibly know this? Even if this is true in today's society, there's no way to know whether or not it would be true in a counterfactual society where gender equality exists.

My opinion is that you probably shouldn't raise money unless you need money to execute your business plan. Some business plans aren't capital intensive, so why give a big chunk of your company away if you don't need additional capital to execute your vision. I don't think mere "growth acceleration" is enough to warrant it. You need to be doing something with the money that you couldn't accomplish otherwise.

> most non-VC late stage rounds are done by the like of investment banks or private equity firms who have a reasonable idea of what they're doing.

They know exactly what they're doing, but their customers don't necessarily. Investment Banks are more than happy to buy and flip overvalued assets to suckers provided they don't have to hold on to them for too long (c.f. 2007.)

I don't have the skill to play any song from start to finish in my head, and I don't know about "closest", but "Does It Float" and "Repulsion" on "Dinosaur" are some specific examples you could look at that have some similarities IMO.

> What is the "I" that is going to choose?

Another good question!

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/

> It seems to me that all these compatibilist arguments aren't really taking that seriously. (Perhaps not surprisingly, since they're being made by philosophers, not physicists.)

They are. Nothing about naturalism implies "I'm a machine made out of atoms, nothing more." Even granting that I am a machine made out of atoms, I'm not just that. I possess other properties than just being a machine made out of atoms--e.g. those atoms are in a particular location, they can affect other sets of atoms, etc.

Going back to the original point, there's nothing innate about sets of atoms that implies they can't also be the subject of moral assertions. I understand that you may not intuitively agree with this position, but there's nothing about sets of atoms that logically rules out this possibility.

You should actually study the philosophy before dismissing it.

Even though they're stylistically pretty different, there are some similarities to Dinosaur Jr. in Uncle Tupelo's earlier more rock-centric stuff. Obviously they never did the J Mascis-style shredding, but some of the other elements are there. I would have never made this connection without your comment though.

Now I have to check out Slowdive...

You're really bringing the Philosophy major in me out tonight!

First off, naturalism does not necessarily imply determinism. But even given physical determinism, the incompatibility of it and free will is not a certainty:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

The point I'm really trying to make is that there are a lot of smart people who have written on all these topics, and the answers are far from settled.

> We long for a real basis for morals, but if all we are is matter obeying the laws of physics, morals cannot be anything more than arbitrarily-made-up rules.

That's not necessarily true: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-realism/#2

I don't have a good answer for why this doesn't happen. However, the fact of the matter is that the wealthy, on the whole, don't naturally redistribute their wealth very effectively.

> Most rich people would just take the basic income as a small tax break, but they're still getting it.

Right, I wasn't clear about this but you're correct that the idea is that technically everybody is given the same amount in one form or another.

Not sure if you're asking sama about his opinion or if you want others to chime in. A popular answer among the HN crowd that I tend to agree with is to tax the wealthy and distribute the proceeds to the poor via a "basic income" scheme.

Taxes would have been a better example.

Wow, I wish I could upvote this comment even more. It's a much more well-thought out version of what I wanted to say on this topic. Thank you.

I'll just add that it seems to me (in the US at least) that one's compensation is more proportional to ones's proximity to financial transactions and the size of those transactions, rather than it is to your overall value creation for society (contrary to what most libertarians, especially those in Silicon Valley, like to argue.) This is why financiers and executives make by far the most money while teachers and scientists make peanuts despite producing great value for society.

I actually had posted it with (For Rental Housing) tacked on the end of the title for clarity, but the mods saw fit to remove that part. Omitting the "in the US" part from that was myopia on my part though--we only aggregate data in the US for now.

Not good! I'm looking into this, sorry.

Edit: This should be fixed now. Anyone, please let me know if you're still having issues.

The data is not only San Francisco proper, it's the entire "San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA" MSA. There's a lot of variation within that:

https://kwelia.com/maps/cbsa_census_tract/San%20Francisco-Oa...

> Because a 400sf apartment in NY is not 1/2 of the cost of a 800sf apartment in NY.

OP here. This is true, but given its flaws this measure is still the industry standard for benchmarking various markets in rental housing. We actually seek to rectify this problem by creating market rent estimates based on a rental's detailed attributes in our product.

I don't understand how this role doesn't fall under the scenario of: "The engineer becomes a manager"

In order to do a superlative job as a manager of a software engineering team, one has to master these same skills. Perhaps the term "Software Scientist" will help distinguish good software engineering management practices from bad ones, but I fail to see how "The Software Scientist" is not a management role.

An alternative to this without a remote is ZBoard (http://www.zboardshop.com), which uses weight sensing (like a Segway) to control the speed instead of a remote which seems a little more natural to ride to me than something with a hand remote like this.

This is exactly my feeling as well. I would take a huge productivity hit without a phone, or without a laptop. I would mostly miss my tablet on plane rides. I would love to see more data on this though, because I wonder if most non-HNers feel the same way.

One of the big positives of Spark is that its architecture is amenable to having workers run on spot instances, which are even cheaper than reserved instances.

I just reproduced this on 10.9.5 as well.

Indeed, the risk-adjusted returns for VC as an asset class are bad compared to other options. I think there's more to the story than "the rich are running out of places to put their money."

> "require" gives you methods that appear out of nowhere (unlike other language where they are name spaced)

I always worry about this too, but in practice I've rarely run into a namespace collision (I can't even remember the last time it happened.)

Concurrency (Clojure, Erlang)

According to data pulled from here:

http://www.wealthandwant.com/issues/income/income_distributi... (Summary Table 1. Effective Federal Tax Rates, 2005)

The bottom 20% makes around 4% of the total income, so I grant that income is not as lopsided as wealth. And sure, you could potentially build a successful business targeting that. But it certainly doesn't seem like nearly as attractive a demographic to target as the other 80% with 96% of the cash flow.

For what it's worth, I favor a greater amount of wealth redistribution than we currently have not only because I think it's the morally right thing to do, but also because I think it would result in greater overall spending. (e.g. people who have a lot of surplus money now are less likely to spend those incremental savings than those who need more money to live comfortably now.)

This has been alluded to in other comments, but without any data. The "unexotic underclass" has virtually no money to spend compared to the upper classes. The bottom 40% in the US has only 0.2% of the wealth!

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_of_wealth#mediavi...

More generally, logic can be used to demonstrate the limitations of logic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_th...

You could say that a neural network found this limitation of neural networks, to the extent that neural networks could be defined in terms mathematical logic. However, it's not guaranteed that the neural networks in our brain could be explained in these terms--the physical processes underlying them are not fully understood.

Yep, my first thought upon seeing the title was: wait, what about non-computable functions?