705 karma · joined August 3, 2021
There might be even a reverse factor: fake products. In my eyes, golden stuff always looks cheap. If someone in my bubble would suddenly wear a golden watch, we'd make fun why they got it from some guy on the street for five bucks.
The value of a currency is how much people are willing to pay to have the other currency. For example, if Japan is importing many goods and services, they need to pay them in USD and so they have to buy USD on the market.
> Both, Japan and the US are increasing their monetary base by what, 10% per year?
The monetary base is not strictly connected to the money in the economy. Most of the money is created by commercial banks when they hand out loans. So the entire money in the economy can shrink (people paying back more loans than they), while at the same time the central bank increases currency.
For reference: https://www.bundesbank.de/resource/blob/654284/df66c4444d065...
I guess roughly, this is right. But there's more to add. I have a brain with a certain configuration. This configuration is partly genetic and partly environmental. The environmental part has been shaped by every sensory input so far, including all the books. However, some books resonate well. They make me think about the topic weeks after finishing them. Other books don't resonate at all. My brain's is not fit for them. It just ja sequence of words (e.g., the books my high school literature teacher made me read).
I guess humans aren't a ANN that treats every training sample equal. Our brain has a mechanism to put more or less weight on sensory input given previous input. Some ideas are utterly confusing and don't stick at all. I think this happens a lot when people of different religions or political camps interact.
It seems like the imaginef gap between human intelligence and the one of other animals is shrinking. I guess much of this difference comes from the fact that humans accumulate so much knowledge over tens of thousands of years. Take all this away and we'd probably not be so different.
Sugar gives people a little dopamine boost. So if, as a company, you make your product a little more sugary, people like it more. Then, all the companies are in an arms race to make the tastiest product and you end up where we are.
Of course, it's not only about sugar. You also want to make it more salty and fatty because people like that too.
If I encounter a problem that I cannot solve sufficiently with the methods I already know, I start exploring and read material until I find something that does the job.
The other way around makes you try to apply your new and fancy method everywhere simply because you're excited about it and it's new.
There's a similar phenomenon in tech in general, when people suddenly start to adopt OOP everywhere or there's a new JavaScript framework around the corner without assessing what the benefit will be.
I moved last year and for this purpose, I created a little command line utility to track every single item. Of course I have much more. But it forced me to reconsider every item. I let go of many items and now, for example, all my tools are tracked and localized. When I need to fix something I can query to find out where they are.
The main benefit to me it that I buy and sell stuff deliberately as I have to record or delete it in the database.
Back then, we weren't connected to the internet. So getting a compiler was a real problem. I found one book that contained a CD with software. That's why my first language was C.
The first program sorted integers in an array. I later learned that the algorithm is called bubble sort.
I think this is yet another good example of thinking with double entry bookkeeping.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/022416/why-b...
I think double-entry bookkeeping is, at least to me, as fundamental to economics (and of course business) as logic to math. Even if some actors don't use it explicitly, it still holds. If I buy ten apples for 10 bucks, I have ten more apples in stock and ten bucks less.
Many economic discussions (not only on HN) get out of hands because people don't try to see the full picture or deliberately choose to see one side. I've even seen a professor of economics claim in public that the world is too much in debt. Well, double-entry bookkeeping tells you that there are always two sides to consider.
For example, in case of governmental debt they ignore the other side of that debt, which might be assets. Assets like airports, schools, bridges, etc. Usually, we call such things useful.
Another typical example is the central bank "prints money". Well, double-entry bookkeeping tells us that it's not possible. If they hand out currency, the counterpart needs to trade something in (typically repurchase agreements with commercial banks). (Leaving aside here the idea of helicopter money, which could even go into neg. equity or a loss.)
In an ideal world, every publication would be more similar to a Git repository or a website that contains all the code for the statistical evaluations and, of course, the raw data that was collected initially The code would document why a certain sample was excluded etc. Of course, the results wouldn't be presented in dry tables or bar charts. There would be interactive visualizations that support the understanding of the data and results. All this would be integrated into the text. Of course, such a text would have real hyperlinks to other works without the need to go to a reference section and look up a publication.
If a publication would fail to replicate, the original authors or their academic offspring would add a remark that this work is superseeded by some other work.
Needless to say that all this has been proposed already in publications ironically in PDF. Also noteworthy that Berners-Lee proposed the WWW 35 years ago, which basically implements this.
On the other hand, I'm annoyed by the omnipresent File, Edit, View, ... stuff in the menu bar. Even if those functions make no sense for a given application. And then I have to open several brittle layers there to reach a certain function.
I think UI research can do better. And by that I don't mean stashing everything into a hamburger menu.
Not sure if I would base such extrapolations on a single year. For every country with this naming convention, I could probably find a number > 1 for a given year and extrapolate.
Also makes me wonder why we have societies where women give up their name. They carry the offspring inside but then they adopt the father's name. I think even genetically women contribute more through mitochondrial DNA.
Why would the parliament abandon its position? At least in theory, it's the center of power.
For example, the license could include something like: if we cannot identify and contact you in a reasonable amount of time, you have no say. Or: contributions from a certain amount of lines of code require a stable contact etc.
I don't see a problem of liability in general. And for special cases, one can still require verification. I can very well imagine that people develop critical software open source. For example, a governmental app, or a software for a nuclear power plant. Then, the public can also have a look and see how things are operating. However, open source doesn't mean that anybody is invited to contribute IMHO.
When I started my PhD I read this text as well. Of course I was very motivated of doing only important research. After some time I even found a nice research topic and worked on it for over two years. Even my advisor pointed out that it was a very novel and foundational idea.
At the same time, a colleague published three papers in top conferences. Their approach was basically to look at publications from the previous conference, apply some delta that they had an advantage over other teams and publish this in the next round.
Reviewers were happy because their publications already got cited and they understood the topic well.
Whereas my topic used an algorithm from the seventies that reviewers had to revisit. My topic didn't fit so well into the overall conference trend and so I still have way less citations than those incremental works.
When someone asks me if it's worth doing a PhD I tend to say that you need to like the direction in which science is going. If you don't like it and are rather rebellious, it's better to start a company.
Is my partner conscious? My dog? Actually, I don't know. I can say that I experience myself as conscious.
In our daily interactions we never ask such questions. Last week, I hired a new programmer. We checked the CV and the code challenge. We invited the candidate to see how they get around with the team etc. At no point, we asked if they're conscious.
I think our brains are machines for predicting what happens next. Therefore, a large brain makes sense because it can simulate the world more precisely and make better predictions. One mistake of this simulation is that the brain simulates us as a conscious agent who can make their own decisions and act in the world. In contrast, we are just machines who operate by the laws of quantum mechanics.
Maybe evolution set up this illusion on purpose so that we don't get depressed and kill ourselves.
I agree. As I commented recently here, we should also normalize by total hours worked. People in the US work much more than in many other countries.
I guess one use of total GDP adj. b. PPP would be when countries negotiate something. Then, China would have a strong argument for setting terms.
I think this is the reason why every innovation takes time until it's faded in completely and the entire society benefits from the innovation. So, neither AI nor other innovations will usher in an era of explosive growth.
I think I understand the rationale behind this. Basically people should take some rest every now and then. Personally, I consider this a violation of my freedom to work however I like. I like to work and usually I take just a few days off per year so I can, for example, visit the dentist without being stressed out to miss a work-related meeting. 20 days is basically an entire month of work. So people there work only 11/12 per year.
> I certainly hope faculty will take this essay to heart and sharpen their insulting skills. In the future please make all your thrusts count.
I guess many people here will point out that they should use other tools. I think we should help them in any way.
They could also prefix every gene with Gn so it cannot be confused with other acronyms (e.g., GnDEC12). It not only breaks parsing by computers but also by humans who might read offensive words into it. Depending on the structure of data this prefix could even be compressed with 0 bits.
Tried the same with Haskell and the Fibonacci series because there's a similar joke on the internet. It's similar but not as stereotypical.