maus42

Literally or literally? And that depends on your definition of slavery. It did not always mean every and all things involuntary, it used to mean trading people as property who did not have the same rights as a free citizen.

Afterthought. I just remembered that some of the more radical leftists call working for a salary a wage slavery, which is similarly silly.

The traditional definition for a slave is a human who is treated as (usually tradable) property for their labor.

I always like to point out that the predecessor to the Western civilization, the ancient Mediterranean, including Greek city states and then later on Rome, was famously built upon slave labor. Even the democratic Athens had a large slave population. However, in a Greek city state like Athens (or the earliest form of Roman legions) the free men -- the slaveowners of the society -- were also the hoplites fighting the wars the city would be involved in. Being a citizen of such a city-state is one the origins of the Western concept of citizenship.

The distinction if you are able to view your community as "us", towards whom you have obligations and duties, not as "them" who rule over you.

Well, in WW2 US had a draft too...

Concept of "reserve officer" in a context of conscript force is not limited to Singapore.

>'if this isn't for you then you can go home'

Instead of practical motivators like weekend holidays and such, in more philosophical sense some of the better arguments in my opinion:

1. "So you don't feel like doing this and you want to go home. Consider this. If one day the shit gets real, are you sure there will be still home for you to return to afterwards?"

Many countries have Ministries of Defense and call their armed forces "defense forces". That sometimes makes me uncomfortable because the (not unintended) likeness to the Orwellian ministry naming scheme of 1984. However, compared to some countries, with some other countries a better case can be made that their military really exist for a defense of a political system against a potential immediate existential threat.

For example, South Korea still has conscription. European countries started moving to volunteer forces en masse only after the Cold War was over. Consider the political climate Sweden is in and why they suddenly think they need an army.

Of course, this is going to be as effective as credible the threat is and (more importantly) how willing the populace is to trust the their countries' political institutions. For example, looking at the map, Switzerland does not face any immediate military threats from its neighbors, but I understand that their conscript force is reasonably popular and motivated. According to Wikipedia numbers quite many people simply do not serve for some reason or another.

2. "If this isn't for you, then you are free to fill in the forms for declaring yourself conscientious objector and you will shipped to the non-armed civilian service to serve rest of you term ASAP."

This one hasn't been relevant in all conscript-based systems in all time and places, but in modern times it is. If the strategy does not call for absolutely every person capable of holding a rifle to do so, this is an option.

Additionally, if failing the service is considered shameful enough, the military may very well be willing to simply kick the unmotivated out.

In general, I believe it's more or less established that people are less likely to volunteer to do boring things, but if participation is mandatory and you need to do make a decision to get out, most people are going to do the compulsory thing. Of course, many people are quite averse to war because it's quite possible that you may really die, so usually the armies of the world make the "getting out" option penalized somehow. In the ideal world I'd actually like to see the "opt-out" version without any further penalties tried sometimes somewhere.

3. Additional forms of persuasion known to exist in various countries at various points of time are different forms of legal consequences, ranging from extra tax to jail to prison to death penalty.

During the Cold War, Sweden had one the most formidable air forces in the European theater (supported by homegrown industrial base), whatever passes for a navy in Baltic Sea and large not that badly armed conscript force, together probably quite capable of at least providing a credible hindrance to any forces the Soviets would throw against them.

I always wondered how quickly that was dismantled. I guess they still have a navy.

Yes. I also have major in a math-y subject, with extensive minor in CS, but all the jobs seem to be in building shiny webapps with the latest JS framework to sell people stuff or services. Data Science that is much talked about seems to mostly about glorified statistics for advertising. Chances of getting into the R&D department of BigCo's moonshot project (think about self-driving cars or something) are 1-in-million.

As far as I know academia has no pay and no stable career prospects for a student like me because I'm not the top-of-the-top of my class, just slightly above the average, but at least there is a promise of a chance of doing something interesting that might wider humanity's perspectives and maybe even help us. With real technological progress.

I suspect you've got the cause and effect backwards. More likely, because he found that niche where he does not have to learn to moderate, he does not.

Fascinating stuff. I've now done maths for some years now and this is the first time I even hear about sheafs.

Makes one wonder what else you may have missed just because it's not something profs at your programme are interested in.

edit. Follow-up. I wonder if there's a list of curious and possibly useful math stuff you might easily miss because it's not as ubiquitous and 'canonical' as (e.g.) analysis, linear algebra or functional analysis?

I think this is a good observation and deserves more attention. Everybody loves Orwell, on both sides of the Great American Culture War.

During the election campaign I saw my US friends to compare Trump speeches to Two Minutes of Hate from the 1984 book. It was funny, I remarked, because the Trump-leaning people I occasionally argue with in the Internet had been calling angry Twitter users attacking various Republicans or Brendan Eich of Mozilla or whoever was the target of the latest scandal a social media version of Two Minutes of Hate years earlier. Then I wondered about where the Gamergate lashing out at "immoral journalists" fit in.

Is Orwell popular today because everyone loves to metaphorically hit their enemies with a famous author who described famous dystopia, or is it because both sides are equally guilty, well, I don't know.

My personal favorite dystopian author is Ray Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451. It is a book about an age where it's not the totalitarian government that burns books, but people who don't want to read books because they might be uncomfortable with the old ideas they might find, preferring spending their time in a room covered by flat screens, talking with their 'friends'. Quite remarkable for a book written in 1950s.

>stale coffee

I'd say consuming stale coffee is totally fine. The only certain way (that I'm aware of) to get coffee that won't be stale is to grind the beans just before use, and I certainly do not have patience for that. I buy packaged coffee even if my hipster-y friends disapprove.

For a regular coffee drinker, a far more useful way to improve the taste of coffee is to remember to wash the pot of the coffee machine more regularly.

It might be groundbreaking if no one else had the idea to use even plain old SVD to look at the problem. (And it would still look like a new method to some particular scientific subfield if the Silicon Valley ads and marketing people never published about the methods they are using in the journals these people read...)

And learning SVD if you start at zero background in required maths, especially if nobody is exactly telling you what to learn and how to learn it and how to use it (yes I'm stereotyping the word 'psychologist' heavily here) could plausibly take "years". I'm doing maths and while I had first encounter with eigendecompositions during the 1st year linear algebra (which remarkably many students find hard), I think it wasn't until the 3rd year when we covered SVDs in their full theoretically detailed glory in the class.

Lots of "groundbreaking" stuff involves 'simply' applying techniques developed elsewhere to new problem domains. There's still some low-hanging fruit left for applied maths and statistics.

However, I don't know enough about this particular area to really say if the statement of "groundbreaking" are really warranted, but that could be one plausible defense of the claim.

edit. Edited to apply to your edit.

I once worked at a largish corp with large *nix user contingent. We had Dell laptops and docks and I don't remember having problems you described.

However, the IT support had a list of 'recommended' distros (Ubuntu LTS if memory serves) and kernels and they preferred very much if you stuck to those.

>[...] Five months into it and I was fully hooked. I had complete farmer empathy. I set a goal—some level, some league that seemed just on the edge of “enough.” Make it over that line and I’d pull the plug. What makes Clash of Clans so treacherous is that you are always building, sculpting. Five months of work is really five months of work. Each additional day of play makes it that much more difficult to abandon.

>As I got closer to my goal — that mythical league on the horizon — I felt the algorithms turn on me. I sensed they knew I had a goal, and they turned that goal into an unobtainable carrot. Was I being paranoid? Maybe. The last day I played, I played for ten hours straight. Play the game slowly, a few minutes a day over months, and the algorithms are insidious. Play the game in a manic burst, and suddenly the algorithms feel laid bare. I spent only $40 over those five months, but those last ten hours were grueling. The closer I got to the goal, the more the algorithm would knock me down, set me up with what appeared to be easy wins only to have me lose. Disheartened, I’d try again, this time beating someone against whom I should have lost. Over and over this continued. It was so perfectly tuned to my most primitive set of chemical desires that it was actually beautiful — a thing of beauty. I could feel it moving beneath the screen. Its tendrils and my neurons moving with an eerie synchronicity. But of course, the lock-step relationship was weighted heavily towards the house; just as victory was once again in sight, I was back to my position ten moves and an hour prior. Where did it end?

I believe these problems are a major problem for the society. There is far more and far easier opportunities to procrastinate than before, and the net result is that the quoted stuff above is what the people do instead of doing useful stuff. When before did you have a combined one-armed bandit and casino inside your pocket, and it was acceptable to regularly take break from your work -- heck, even middle of conversation with other people -- to visit one of those?

And then people talk like developing even more insidious casinos is the future of software industry, the thing where the VCs invest.

Economy should not grow for the sake of the ever larger GDP per capita number. I'm not advocating for planned economy, but it should matter what kind of things, including what kind of entertainment and other luxuries, are being produced.

> Nobody will go to jail for Wells Fargo fraud either.

True. Also remember many people who tried to bowl a whistle on the fraud can't now get employed in the banking because Wells Fargo blacklisted them...

There's only a dozen or so notes thus far, but it looks like it potentially could be very useful repository.

Found via Terence Tao's blog [1].

[1] https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2016/12/17/ams-open-math-note...

The blog post reiterates what everybody probably already knows; similar content gets posted on HN semi-regularly.

On the other hand, I've also heard that most of interns' / junior devs' first projects end up shelved (i.e. net contribution = 0).

From a viewpoint of a mediocre developer, a far more interesting question is how to get into the feedback loop where you actually learn from your mistakes and the quality of your contributions improves.

I'd characterize it as "very long pauses between replies that are less awkward than one would expect".

I know a person who works in atmospheric physics group. All the heavy physics simulation and modeling happens in Fortran, and then they do the "lighter" analysis, summary statistics, plots, visualizations, etc with a Python-based stack.

You don't need to be an overlay journal to be an open access journal. In machine learning (that maybe is something many here are more interested in than the quite abstract math stuff of Discrete Analysis), JMLR has been around for a quite long time: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/

>a bigger number

Well, there's an order of magnitude or two children going to regular schools... One needs a bit more statistics to back or disprove any argument.

Agreed. The article is mostly about parthenogenetic reproduction and curious evolutionary history of a certain lizard species.

addendum. The subtitle ("What we can learn about evolution from species who thrive without sexual reproduction") is more descriptive.

Depends on your definition of 'fluent'. To speak like a native, you probably need to spend several years in a community where your target language is spoken as primary language. However, you don't need to be fully fluent to passably talk, read and write even on advanced level (like politics or academic subjects).

Find the part of the internet that communicates in your target language. Read and participate. Structured language classes with a professional teacher are helpful, but not sufficient.

Duolingo is nice for very basic introduction and first "stepping stone", but not enough if you want to progress farther than the basic tourist level (at least, not in the languages I have tried it).

After ~15 years studying (both in school and other activities), I wouldn't consider myself fully fluent in English but capable enough to get by in professional context.

Tyler Cowen blogs on Marginal Revolution about winners and their work:

Hart: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/10/oli...,

Holmström: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2016/10/ben...

>I've worked on this problem before

I suppose it helps if you're already familiar with the problem domain. Nevertheless, it's very cool indeed.

Some of that is just bad material (#3, shapes that should be shaded are not shaded). Others try to explain how at least I do arithmetic mentally (the particular example 7 + 7 feels silly because the answer was drilled to my brain in primary school, but the idea of decomposing number to parts that easier to sum together is sound -- and it feels like nice intuition to algebraic way of thinking). On the other hand, insisting in drawing graphical representations might be boring and feel silly if you already got it.

In other words, the Common Core seems to get flak because some of the material is simply bad and sometimes seems not to have good idea how to convey the Common Core ideas.

The title is missing year 2012. ("This entry was posted on June 8, 2012 at 4:53 pm")

Does anyone know what happened regarding all this?

The thing is, if you stop for a moment, spend a considerable amount of time of studying hard sciences, and apply that worldview to almost any "hard science" .. most of the hard sciences haven't been or are not that hard. Still, step by step (and misstep) and luck we have progressed forward.

The "objective data" isn't some inherent peculiarity of hard sciences. It's a feature of long tradition of aspirations towards intellectual honesty, distilled in the usage of mathematical methodology.

You can get a good data softer sciences, but this demands lots of work and paying attention to proper statistical methodology.

It gets more difficult less you can apply mathematics, but there's nothing in particular that makes bullshitting acceptable. Even in non-mathematical fields such as history and archeology, there's still possibility of hard evidence; it just requires lot of humility what you reasonably can infer from it, and sometimes you have to accept that there's not enough data for making conclusions.

The possibility of knowledge requires that everybody does their best to pay the necessary respect to the gods of science that enable its existence. Science is a social project that can't function unless participants believe in it and demand intellectual rigour of each other, work to reduce bullshitting. Giving up and joining the bullshitters does not make you more knowledgeable; it just amounts to treason.

>Also, store opening times are nowadays unregulated in Finland.

Well, that was a very recent change. But I don't know if that's very representative of Nordics in general, I know that shopping hours have been deregulated in Sweden for a quite long time.

Majority of the so called "luxury taxes" (that were really named so) existed maybe one or two hundred years ago, mainly targeted then-existing aristocracy, but most of such special taxes are long gone. (Maybe the after-effects are still showing up in weird places, like your clerk's imagination...) One gem was the literal "tax on fun" (which applied to cinema shows and dance halls), but that was discontinued in the 1950s. I guess only "luxury taxes" that we have now are quite "normal" by Western standards, like sales taxes on confectionery and alcohol and cars.

More recently, a couple of generations ago there might have been import tariffs on consumer electronics...?

I can't think any other tax on the product itself than the regular 24% value added tax. (Of course, the indirect ones, like income tax paid by employees, tax on corporate profit, etc probably show in the final price.)

Foodstuffs do have lower VAT rate (around 10%), so maybe the clerk was thinking about that, but that difference doesn't explain a 5€ -> 100€ hike. Maybe you just managed to wander to the most expensive retail store in the downtown and had an unusual camera model...

Finland is expensive place, but most of that caused by more mundane reasons than special "luxury tax", like indirect taxes, regulation, and shipping costs raising the general price levels.