jonshea

Your comparison to inject molding is correct. The press is used to hold the die mold halves together. I enjoyed this video that explained the process https://youtu.be/FUsicN-wKoY?t=234

People say this kind of thing a lot, but I’m pretty sure it’s simply not true. bash-completion handles pretty much everything I can imagine already, and can be extended to handle anything you can express programmatically.

We do the simplest thing we could imagine. Our sitemap of ~50,000,000 entries is written to static xml once a week as part of a batch job and pushed to S3. Is there any reason to believe it needs to be updated near real time? How often does Google read yours?

If we assume that Saverin had to pay his taxes by selling shares at the same price at which the IRS assessed then, then my logic still holds. Saverin would have to sell 15% of his stock to pay the 15% tax.

If, as you suggest, he is able to sell his shares at a greater valuation than the IRS uses to calculate his exit tax, then you are correct. When you renounce your citizenship, I have no idea how long the IRS gives you to actually pony up the exit tax.

By my math, Eduardo Saverin doesn’t avoid any tax at all by leaving the US, regardless of whether or not his stock goes up or down. If he leaves, the US takes 15% of his stock now. If he stays, the US takes 15% of his stock later. But either way, the US have taken away 15% of his ability to spend.

Let’s work through it with numbers, in case that isn’t clear. Say Saverin has $100 worth of Facebook stock. He renounces US citizenship. He sells enough stock to pay $15 to the government, leaving him with $85 in Facebook stock. Over the next year, Facebook doubles in value, leaving him with $170 in stock. He cashes out, and there’s no tax, so he ends up with $170 in cash.

Now imagine he stays in the US. He has $100 in Facebook stock, which he pays no tax on because there is no taxable event. Facebook doubles in value over the next year, so he ends up with $200 in stock. Then he cashes out, paying 15% in capital gains, leaving him with $170 cash.

Clearly he ends up with the same amount of cash either way. Perhaps Saverin is avoiding tax by leaving the US, but neither this article nor any other article I have read identifies how he is doing so.

To be clear, you are comparing a sharded Riak cluster against an unsharded MongoDB installation?

In 1729 Jonathan Swift anonymously published “A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick” [1], which suggested that poverty and overpopulation in Ireland could be alleviated if the poor would either eat their children, or sell their children as food to the rich. In allusion to the original, the phrase “A Modest Proposal” is used to introduce suggestions that are satirical, hyperbolic, and sarcastic. Not knowing the origin of the phrase, some authors use it to introduce proposals that are genuinely modest, much to the disappointment of this reader.

fn. 1: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1080

I find Sparrow for Mac much more pleasant than gmail or Mail.app. I’ve been on Sparrow’s beta build since the Sparrow beta started. I haven’t had any serious issues since version 1.0 was released, and I’ve received grateful replies to all of the minor issues I have emailed them about.

Sparrow for iOS is an insta-buy for me.

Did Kim Dotcom ever leave his house? Could it possibly have been cheaper, safer, and easier to, say, pull over his car and arrest him on the side of the road? Wouldn’t that also leave Dotcom less cause and opportunity to activate Megaupload’s alleged self-destruct mechanism?

Good to know. Thanks Paul!

They’re interesting problems, a good way to improve your coding skills, and an amazing way to train for interviews.

If anyone is able, would you please explain to me these two questions from the quiz? I’m stumped.

Why does `toSeq` compile, but not `toIndexedSeq`?

    Set(1,2,3).toIndexedSeq sortBy (-_)
    Set(1,2,3).toSeq sortBy (-_)

Why does `h` compile, but `f` does not?

    def add(x: Int, y: Int) = x + y
    val f = add(1,_)
    val h = add(_,_)

Plurals of Latin / Greek words used in English: http://alt-usage-english.org/excerpts/fxplural.html One of my favorite pages.

You mean “without any prior evidence”. The phrase “a priori” means “by reason or deduction alone, without empirical evidence”. The phrase “a priori evidence” is an oxymoron.

Before posting that there is an easy or obvious resolution to the “paradox”, please read at least the first couple pages of the literature survey that Landsburg links to [1].

""" The meta-paradox consists of two seemingly incompatible facts. The first is that the surprise exam paradox seems easy to resolve. Those seeing it for the first time typically have the instinctive reaction that the flaw in the students’ reasoning is obvious. Furthermore, most readers who have tried to think it through have had little difficulty resolving it to their own satisfaction.

The second (astonishing) fact is that to date nearly a hundred papers on the paradox have been published, and still no consensus on its correct resolution has been reached. The paradox has even been called a “significant problem” for philosophy [30, chapter 7, section VII]. How can this be? Can such a ridiculous argument really be a major unsolved mystery? If not, why does paper after paper begin by brusquely dismissing all previous work and claiming that it alone presents the long-awaited simple solution that lays the paradox to rest once and for all? """

fn 1: http://www-math.mit.edu/~tchow/unexpected.pdf

Landsburg actually addresses this in his next post! Regarding the Liar Paradox you bring up:

"""One of Kurt Godel’s great insights was that you can go a lot deeper by considering a slightly different sentence: “This sentence is not provable”. If that statement is false, then it’s provable. But surely no false statement should be provable! So maybe the statement is true. In that case, it’s true but not provable, which says something about the limits of logic. It says that not every true statement can be proved.""" [1]

fn 1: http://www.thebigquestions.com/2011/12/13/a-tale-of-three-pa...

Amazing experiment. I wonder if it cost Yudkowsky money to get out of the box. I think that a bribe is the only way he could convince me to let him “win” the contest.

It’s a bit of a spoiler to post it here, but Nick Bostrom’s “The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant” (Journal of Medical Ethics, 2005, Vol. 31, No. 5) is the single most influential essay that I have ever read. It completely changed how I think of aging.

http://www.nickbostrom.com/fable/dragon.html

I’m on my 5th productivity motivated SC2 uninstall, but I’ll reinstall for an NYC Startupcraft.

My understanding is that you are correct. I believe that BigDecimal.doubleValue() does the conversion by (wait for it…) converting to a string and parsing with Double.parseDouble(). Real quick:

scala> val y y: java.math.BigDecimal = 2.2250738585072012E-308

scala> y.doubleValue() Hangs

This is one of those “harder than it looks” problems.

Foursquare (NYC, SF): http://foursquare.com/jobs/

We have positions coding for our mobile clients (iPhone, Android, BlackBerry) and our server team. Our server code is all in Scala (booyah functional programming). It’s a superb team in fun work environment, full of exciting projects, and with an amazing dataset.

Feel free to send me an email at the same username, or apply through the web page.

Agreed. Doukutsu Monogatari is, rivaled only by Braid, the most beautiful, fun, and moving video game I have ever played. It is astonishingly creative and innovative. The gameplay is challenging, but fun. And there’s not even a hint of repetition.

It is a masterpiece. I wish that I could play it again for the first time.

Very interesting. I’m glad that you pointed out that the Economist is “anonymous”. (If you haven’t noticed, almost all Economist articles are published without a byline). It’s a quirk I’ve never been convinced that they adequately justify. One of my favorite gags is to claim that I write for the Economist? Don’t believe me? I challenge you to prove that I don’t.

I largely agree with dhh’s thesis that “minority investment valuations aren’t real”, and I agree that the lack of liquidity is part of the problem. But I think it’s “liquidity preference” that totally breaks the investor valuation.

As a toy example, imagine a company that could be worth $3, $30, or $300 each with equal probability. The logical valuation of this company is $111. A risk tolerant investor would pay $11.1 for 10% of the company.

Now imagine you have a 3x liquidation preference. If the company liquidates for less than 3 times your investment, then you get it all and the suckers holding common stock get nothing. How much will you pay for 10% of the company in this situation?

Well, if the company exits at $3 or $30 then you’ll get all of it, and if it exits at $300 then you get $30. The total expected value is ($3 + $30 + $30)/3 = $21. That’s almost twice what you’d pay if didn’t have liquidity preference! Even though, with 3x liquidity preference, you’d pay $21 for 10% of the company, $210 is clearly a nonsense valuation for the company as a whole.

In pottery there’s a saying that if you’ve made something and you’re not sure it’s good enough to sell, then you should just glaze it blue and someone will buy it regardless.

The Black Swan was a black swan.

WhizzyTeX is _amazing_. It probably triples my productivity for LaTeX when the material is math intensive. If you’re typesetting matrixes or tables, or anything else where you have to align things, then WhizzyTeX is even better still.

In graduate school I could take math notes in real time as long as the lecture was fairly well structured and there weren’t too many diagrams. I think my System ID and Control notes turned out even better than the textbook.

Unfortunately, while I didn’t have any trouble running WhizzyTeX on Ubuntu, I never got it working well on OS X. I think I (maybe) got it to go using xpdf in X11, but it’d be much nicer if you could run Skim or Preview as viewer instead. If there’s ever a time when I need to do a lot of LaTeX again then I’ll definitely look into writing a patch.

I still dream that one day I’ll have something like WhizzyTeX for building websites. Imagine if you could edit your source files in your favorite editor and have the rendered webpage update with every keystroke. It’s the best of both WYSIWYG and plain source editing. You could definitely make something work if you were editing plain html, but if you’re using a framework (and who isn’t?) then it starts to seem a lot more complicated.