377 karma · joined January 17, 2015
I don't know many women who feel this way, and women's interest in jewelry has historically helped establish an important floor for the value of gold. If civilization collapsed tomorrow women would work hard to protect their gold, but not their Bitcoin (or similar). But of course , it doesn't require societal collapse to put downward pressure on Bitcoin.
"We wish to thank Jordan Halterman for his discussion of Hazelcast use cases. Luigi Dell’Aquila & Luca Garulli from OrientDB, and Denis Sukhoroslov from BagriDB, were instrumental in understanding those systems’ use of Hazelcast. Thanks also to Julia Evans, Sarah Huffman, Camille Fournier, Moishe Lettvin, Tim Kordas, André Arko, Allison Kaptur, Coda Hale, and Peter Alvaro for reading and offering comments on initial drafts. This research was performed independently by Jepsen, without compensation, and conducted in accordance with the Jepsen ethics policy."
I'd like to know who stands behind this research
"The JavaScript ecosystem nowadays is responsible for the global revolution the same way steam engines were responsible for the first industrial revolution"
That is ridiculous. Here is reality:
1.) Labor productivity has been in long-term decline, though computers did cause a temporary surge in the 1990s. See the charts in this post:
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/07/monday-smackdown-repu...
2.) Economic growth remains sluggish, especially compared to the post war boom of 1945-1973.
3.) The railroads sparked a massive investment boom. The only time computer technologies came close to triggering a similar boom was during the 1990s.
A comparison might be made to retail. Sometimes you'll see a store that is very busy, full of customers, and then it goes out of business. Why did it fail when it was so busy? Often the reason is that the landlord raised the rent.
High costs can kill an otherwise good business idea.
Since 2015, the economy has returned to almost normal, so the need to invest in software startups is reduced. And this would most likely effect San Francisco the most, since it had received the most investment during the era 2009-2014.
Now that the economy is almost back to normal, there are a lot of areas in the economy that offer possible returns. The need to focus on software startups is diminished.
"Novelty search is a recent algorithm geared toward exploring search spaces without regard to objectives. When the presence of constraints divides a search space into feasible space and infeasible space, interesting implications arise regarding how novelty search explores such spaces. "
The idea of Open Source was still in its early days, and only Perl had a great central library of code that was free for anyone to use.
And of all these languages, most were hot with a fanatic idealism about how Object Oriented Programming would solve the problems of the tech industry. Those languages that rejected Object Oriented Programming (Python and PHP, and also, to a lesser extent, Perl) were proud of their defiance, till the moment (a few years later) when they gave in and decided to become Object Oriented.
There has been a convergence of culture. Nowadays most programming languages have all of the same things:
1.) package managers to manage your dependencies
2.) frameworks with command line tools to automate setup and database migrations
3.) multi paradigm -- most languages now facilitate Object Oriented Programming, but also Logic programming and Functional programming and pattern matching, and other paradigms.
4.) open source libraries of code for everything, typically on Github
Nowadays I can go from writing in Python to writing in Javascript, and most of the stuff I expect is exactly the same in both languages. I can think these words about practically any language that I am asked to work with: "Oh, I have to write a module to send email to new users? Okay, let me look up the open source libraries that handle email. There are probably a dozen projects on Github"
There is much more of a mainstream to computer programming than their used to be. This "normalization" happened first with software for the Internet, though lately its even been spreading to hardware projects. A few languages (Clojure, Haskell) still have strong philosophical differences from the mainstream, but they offer the common basics, like any languages that nowadays wants to make a programmer feel productive.
So these lists of skills are less meaningful than they used to be. Once upon a time it would take months to give up one language and learn a new one, whereas nowadays the switch is easier, since so many assumptions that are true in one language remain true when you switch to a different language.
Six separate services allowed multiple benefits:
1.) each service was smaller and faster
2.) each service was focused on the real needs of its users
3.) each service was free to evolve without harming the people who did not use the service
There was some duplication of code, which suggests a process that is the exact opposite of "Monolith First":
Start with separate services for each group of users, then later look to combine redundant code into some shared libraries.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide
"In many past societies, certain forms of infanticide were considered permissible. In some countries, female infanticide is more common than the killing of male offspring, due to sex-selective infanticide.[3] In China for example, the gender gap between males and females aged 0–19 year old was estimated to be 25 million in 2010 by the United Nations Population Fund."
Also:
"The historical Greeks considered the practice of adult and child sacrifice barbarous,[30] however, the exposure of newborns was widely practiced in ancient Greece, it was even advocated by Aristotle in the case of congenital deformity "
In her Nobel winning novel, The Good Earth, Pearl Buck recounts how the family, during a famine, allows the daughter to starve to death, but then at the last moment the father changes his mind and gives her some food. The child grows up brain damaged, having been deprived of food for several days, when she was only 1 or 2 years old. This part of the novel (like everything else in the novel) has been praised for its realism.
Around the year 610, early in his preaching, one of Muhammad's first revelations from Allah is that parents should no longer leave their newborn daughters to die in the desert. He would not have felt the need to make this pronouncement unless it was a common practice. And remember that his own sister had been set out in the desert and allowed to die as soon as she was born.
https://books.google.com/books?id=LSCf0j5lNeYC&pg=PA142&lpg=...
Also, fitness and kinship:
https://books.google.com/books?id=2XH0CwAAQBAJ&pg=PA113&lpg=...
"With the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France, contemporary American kids may represent the most indulged young people in the history of the world."
Affluent kids in China are also very much indulged, mostly by grandparents.
The main factor at work here is not a mystery: the demographic transition that began in the West around 1850. When families have 20 children, the children are under pressure to prove their worth to the family, relative to all the other children. They compete with each other to show their worth. But when a family only has one child, the parents and grandparents compete to win the favor of the child.
There are nuances, that vary from country to country, but the primary force at work here is the demographic transition.
"Teams are better than individuals and everyone has to be aware of the valuable contributions of employees in other roles. So let's team every programmer with a sales person—preferably working the phones at the same desk—and stack-rank them on the basis of each pair's combined quarterly contribution to the corporate bottom line."
That is gooood.
I would quit, yet be so traumatized that my productivity would still suffer, even at my next job. A double win for the enemy.
"Rural living historically has encouraged independence, and it still does, even in the globalized and wired 21st century. Autonomy and autarky, not narrow specialization, are necessary and are fueled by an understanding that tools must be mastered to keep nature in its proper place."
In reality, the rural areas of the USA are wards of the state. Without government subsidies for water and electricity and telephone services, and without government subsidies for the food that farmers grow, many of the rural areas in the USA would have stopped agricultural production back during the 1930s.
This is strange:
"urbanites have argued that farmers can make do with less but wildlife needs ever more"
I would have thought that a conservative like Victor David Hanson would have been angry about the massive subsidies that the government offers to farmers, but apparently he doesn't care about that. Thanks to those subsidies, the USA typically produces too much food, not too little of it. Scaling back on those subsidies a bit, for a good environmental cause, seems like classical stewardship in action: the state is suppressing the demands of a greedy special interest, in favor of a project which benefits all of society.
I am disappointed that Hanson seems to support government subsidies when it comes to farmers (in the form of water subsidies), but then turns critical of government subsidies when it comes to helping an individual woman. Hanson writes this criticism of the fictional "Julia":
"Looking to cement his lead among urban unmarried women during his 2012 reelection campaign, Barack Obama ran an interactive Web ad, "The Life of Julia." Its dependency narrative defined the life of an everywoman character as one of cradle-to-grave government reliance — a desirable thing. Julia is proudly and perennially a ward of the state. She can get through school only thanks to Head Start and federally backed student loans. Only the Small Business Administration and the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act enable her to find work. In her retirement years, only Social Security and Medicare allow her comfort and the time to volunteer for a communal urban garden, apparently a hobby rather than a critical food source."
So helping big agri-business with government subsidies of water is perfectly acceptable, but helping a woman go to college is a terrible thing?
http://www.space.com/11642-dark-matter-dark-energy-4-percent...
If 96% of the universe consists of dark matter, we should start with the assumption that 96% of life is built of dark matter. Disproving that becomes the work of exploration, but that is the obvious default starting assumption.
I rent some servers from the Rackspace cloud for personal use. I have my own sites on these machines, and my own email servers.
Meanwhile, I have a day job, and lately it has been consuming 12 hours a day. We missed a deadline and we have all been working like crazy to catch up. I have fallen behind reading my personal email.
Roughly a month ago, my friends who use Gmail stopped getting my email. Or rather, they did not know I was sending them email, because all of my email to them was going to spam.
After a few weeks, I finally had a free weekend to catch up on my personal life, so I did some investigations. Turns Rackspace had switched over to IP6 in a way that impacted my email. I did not have a Sender Policy Framework for IP6, only IP4.
It's likely that Rackspace sent me an email about this, though I never read it because I was busy.
This was easy to fix: I added a SPF for IP6.
However, these kinds of issues do make it harder to maintain a personal email server. Its tough for us to keep up with the changes.
After the 7th day I did start to suffer weakness, and I had a busy schedule at work, which put a limit on how long I could fast. The night of the 10th night I slept for 16 hours. The 11th day (a Saturday) I walked 10 kilometers, but it was much more difficult than walking 12 kilometers 4 days earlier.
I doubt I'll ever again do 11 days when I'm working. Maybe on vacation, but not when I have work to do. However, doing 7 days is something I plan to do this month. Because 7 days without food imposed no limits on me, at all.
It has health benefits, it imposes no burden, and it's easy to do. I don't think we need to wait for a drug to be invented, when the solution is so easy and available.
If so many people support the government regulation of debt, why aren't more people running up debts?
If so many people believe our society should have hospitals, why aren't more people going to hospitals?
If so many people support national parks, why aren't more people hiking in national parks?
If so many people support government regulation of the radio spectrum, why aren't more people listening to radio?
If so many people support conservation efforts for lobster, why aren't more people eating lobster?
If so many people support the public good known as _______, why aren't people making use of ________.
The reality is most sane people support a very broad range of policies which do some public good, even if the people themselves don't expect to directly benefit from that good, especially over the short-term. We can all support the existence of hospitals, even if we have no plans to go to a hospital this year. But we want hospitals around just in case we might need them, this year or at some future time.
Likewise with mass transit. I bike to work whenever I can, but if the weather is especially awful, I take the subway.
https://en.santandertrade.com/establish-overseas/portugal/fo...
And FDI stock is down.
The Portuguese are resourceful and they are trying to make the best out of a bad situation. Nevertheless, nothing in the data justifies the title "The Portuguese Miracle: Young Entrepreneurs Lead Country Out of Crisis". This is just more of the same German propaganda that's been trying to justify austerity for the last 6 years. The phrase "One size fits one" applies to monetary policy in Europe: monetary policy has been adapted to German needs, at the cost of great pain for the rest of Europe.
What details you leave off the map, at each scale, is always a hotly contested issue. You could create a world map with the same level of detail as your topological map of the Colorado mountain: 1 centimeter equals 2 meters. However, the map would be too huge to work with, and it would contain too much detail. You remove detail to keep the map convenient to work with, but it must always be convenient to the task that you are working on. You will get yourself into trouble if you work with too large or too small a scale. I remember when I was young, I was often frustrated with the high-level maps we used in history classes, as the scale was often too high for me to understand what was actually going on. I recall seeing the map of the 30 Year War, a bunch of big red and yellow and blue arrows invading different parts of Europe, and it really told me nothing at all about what happened during the war.
"Very little economic activity can be bottled up and saved for years."
That might have been true for hunter-gatherer societies, 10,000 years ago, but since the advent of agriculture, and especially irrigation, human societies have been increasingly dependent on the build up of capital to support an ever more sophisticated civilization. 2,000 years ago, that capital took the form of roads, canals, breakwaters for ports, dykes, walls, structures and, especially, large scale irrigation projects. Modern societies rely on the build up of capital to a much greater extent -- certainly more than I can list in a comment. The capital has been accrued over many decades -- I once read an article in Scientific American that the housing stock of modern Western societies runs on a cycle of about 80 years. The modern build up of capital, on which we depend, would include every form of infrastructure that you could think of, including space-age items such as communication satellites, plus many types that may not be immediately obvious.
Somewhere in the world, each generation must suppress some of its consumption so as to contribute to the accumulation of long-term capital. It used to be that savings were mostly confined to the nation in which they were originated, but of course, over the last 50 years we've seen the globalization of savings, and we've seen vast distortions to the global system, thanks to some countries, such as China, whose government engaged in the systematic suppression of consumption, leading to what Ben Bernanke described as a "global savings glut".
Contrary to what you said, a great deal of economic activity can be bottled up and saved for years. Just because we live in an era in which there was too much saving and too little consumption does not mean that, in the long term, saving is unimportant.
If by "economic activity" you mean activity that supports current consumption, then this is exactly backwards:
"First-world countries are seeing massive demographic shifts towards old age, which means vastly more economic activity must go towards sustaining the retired"
The opposite is true: First-world countries are seeing massive demographic shifts towards old age, therefore the need to raise productivity is more urgent than ever. In the USA, 70 years ago, there were 10 workers for every 1 retired person. In 20 years, there will be 2 workers for every 1 retired person. There we need to see a 500% increase in productivity, over 90 years (measured from 70 years ago), to ensure that everyone can continue to enjoy the same quality of life.
In the past, the accumulation of capital played a large role in raising productivity, and therefore in the future capital might again play a large role in raising productivity. A vast campaign of investment is necessary, to raise productivity. Such a campaign is made easy in the current era thanks to the the low interest rates that were made possible via the global savings glut.