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mohawkon U.S. honeybee colonies hit a 20-year high

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neonicotinoid#Other_wildlife

REVIEW: An overview of the environmental risks posed by neonicotinoid insecticides http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.12111/f...

Forget about the bees, it doesn't sound like something i would like to have on my food...

mohawkon Twitter’s stock falls toward IPO-level prices

Valuation/revenue would be price/sales, or P/S if you will. The P/E is a "forward P/E", with P = "today's price" and E = "someone's expectation of next year's earnings".

mohawkon Show HN: Meadow Education: A beginner's guide to medical marijuana

Actually a lot of the data we have seen so far is quite good, here are some examples

Medical Marijuana for Treatment of Chronic Pain and Other Medical and Psychiatric Problems: A Clinical Review

https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2338266

Cannabidiol: Pharmacology and potential therapeutic role in epilepsy and other neuropsychiatric disorders

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/epi.12631/full

mohawkon Ask HN: What skills would you invest in learning?

Your question is hard to answer because it's not clear what your goal is. More math is always useful, but you wrote you already have a solid background there. Public speaking, communication, and "people skills" in general are always good to have and might become more important later on in your career.

If you want a fun list of topics, here are some off the top of my head that i might look at in your situation:

- fully homomorphic encryption

- recurrent neural networks & machine learning

- proving computer programs correct & computer-aided mathematical proofs

mohawkon When ‘int’ is the new ‘short’

Sorry meant two's complement

mohawkon When ‘int’ is the new ‘short’

Signed types have the same "wraparound" problem, i think the OP meant that they don't have this problem at the zero boundary.

mohawkon When ‘int’ is the new ‘short’

On the contrary! Unsigned types are the only ones in C were everything is sanely defined, they are the integers mod 2^n. Signed types have undefined behaviour on overflow in C. In-band signalling of error states is error-prone. It is unfortunately commonly done in C because you can't return multiple values and passing in pointers is uglier.

mohawkon When ‘int’ is the new ‘short’

size_t has been the right type for buffer/array sizes since ANSI C.

mohawkon When ‘int’ is the new ‘short’

A signed type for a buffer size in Chrome. Sigh, C/C++ just wasn't made for humans.

mohawkon A Dutch city is giving money away to test the basic income theory

> When I see that discussion about basic income I am always wandering, who is going to pay for that?

Just look at all the social "safety nets" that many European countries have. That money then gets relabled "basic income". Pensions, unemployment benefits, paid sick leave, child support money, etc...

For people who are working full-time and don't get anything at the moment, the taxes would have to be increased slightly to offset their "basic income" on average, so maybe with a low wage you would have a small gain, with a big wage you would have slightly less than before.

The advantage could be a massive reduction in bureaucracy. The disadvantage in Europe at least is that many people prefer perceived "fairness" over efficiency, i.e. they are more worried that someone who "should not get that money" will get it than they are worried about their social systems wasting money and peoples' time.

mohawkon Leaked: What's in TPP’s intellectual property chapter

> I just wish I knew how to join this class of people who are important.

Here's a rough guide: be willing to spend lots of $$$ on politicians, and more than the other Johns. Own media companies so you can influence what people think. Work together with other rich people with similar goals, it will take some time.

mohawkon Amartya Sen: The economic consequences of austerity

Thanks for the numbers, you are right.

The charts are remarkably similar for

Greece http://sdw.ecb.europa.eu/quickview.do?SERIES_KEY=129.RPP.Q.G...

Spain http://sdw.ecb.europa.eu/quickview.do?SERIES_KEY=129.RPP.Q.E...

Portugal http://sdw.ecb.europa.eu/quickview.do?SERIES_KEY=129.RPP.Q.P...

But i would still claim that in the case of Greece, the (masked) public debt crisis preceded the asset bubble whereas in Spain, Portugal and Ireland the public debt crisis followed the asset bubble.

mohawkon Amartya Sen: The economic consequences of austerity

Well, i was curious about the exact meaning of austerity so i looked it up before i wrote the post. The three or four sites that i visited (amongst them Wikipedia) agreed with the meaning i used.

Structural deficit is a poorly-defined term, in the sense that there are many reasonable values for it. If you define austerity this way, then we can't even agree if we have austerity or not.

It's also not what most creditors care about. What does it matter if you don't get your money back because of cyclical or structural deficits?

Perhaps you misunderstood me, i didn't mean to imply that austerity is equivalent to a balanced budget. I used austerity in the sense of "increasing revenues and reducing spending" to balance a budget that is in the red.

mohawkon Amartya Sen: The economic consequences of austerity

Greece did not suffer from an asset bubble, the other countries you mentioned did.

Interest rate convergence was one of the criteria for introduction of the Euro:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_convergence_criteria#Crit...

Point 5, long-term interest rates

The ECB's mandate is to worry about price-stability, not the German economy

https://www.ecb.europa.eu/mopo/intro/objective/html/index.en...

Practice may of course deviate from theory, but i don't think it did much here.

German unification was 1990, we are talking about the time around 2000. Many central banks in the world lowered interest rates after the dot-com crash & 9-11 and the economic slowdown that followed.

You might argue that this caused asset bubbles, and i would tend to agree.

If it were up to me, i would add "avoiding asset bubbles" to the ECB mandate, if you want to you could regard it as a kind of price-stability mandate for assets.

mohawkon Amartya Sen: The economic consequences of austerity

Inflating away the currency had no benefit for reparations.

The details are here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperinflation_in_the_Weimar_R...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations

mohawkon Amartya Sen: The economic consequences of austerity

A politicians' goal is to get reelected. If not, their party will quickly replace them with someone who has that goal.

Budget cuts, when they are made, are done in the places where they will minimise the political damage to the party making the cuts.

It's not that nobody can come up with saving money in the bureaucracy, military&secret services, government subsidies, etc. It's just that they are costly in terms of political power and therefore not discussed at all. And the easiest things to slash are things your own voters don't care about and the easiest taxes to increase those that your voters don't pay.

I doubt that any kind of economic thinking goes into these decisions.

mohawkon Amartya Sen: The economic consequences of austerity

First, i'd like to state that i'm talking about austerity in general, not about Greece in particular. Greece needs a debt restructuring, there's no way around it.

The whole reason for all that austerity was that some countries were unable to refinance their debt and other countries are afraid they might not be able to refinance in the future. Refinancing debt in hard times becomes harder yet if it is externally financed.

You need to convince someone to lend you money if you want to run a deficit.

Love it or hate it, the Germans don't like a soft currency. The reason is probably the prelude to the rise of Hitler, which was marked by hyperinflation from printing too much money. It has been in their "DNA" since WW2, and no amount of economic handwaving is going to change that, at least in the forseeable future. In practice Germany has had a budget deficit nearly every year of course (such is politics), they just aren't that big.

The reason Germany joined the Eurozone was the absence of debt mutualisation. The Bundesbank warned that this was hard/impossible without political union, but they were ignored. And so, here we are.

mohawkon Amartya Sen: The economic consequences of austerity

Ah, Japan & GDP growth numbers, the perfect example :)

Are GDP numbers a good indicator of the success of economic policies? They aren't that useful if you ignore all the details.

Here is an example when comparing US and Japan GDP growth numbers:

http://research.stlouisfed.org/publications/es/article/10011

"In summary, three structural factors seem to account for the difference in GDP growth between Japan and the United States in the post-1990 period: (i) the slow population growth in Japan, (ii) the employment rate, and (iii) the decline of average hours worked in Japan from a very high level to the level in the United States. It seems useful to consider these findings when Japan’s experience is used to draw policy conclusions for the United States."

And yet we have been lectured by numerous economists (sometimes with Nobel medals on them) about the implications these raw GDP growth numbers supposedly have for economic policy.

mohawkon Amartya Sen: The economic consequences of austerity

Fascinating how the meaning of the word 'austerity' has drifted away from the meaning of 'austere'. A balanced budget doesn't seem very 'austere' to me.

Many people arguing against balancing budgets (or 'austerity' if you will) do so because the first budgets to be slashed are usually things where the benefits are long-term, such as education. But it's a false dichotomy that these are the only choices.

Then there's the economists, who will pull out some toy model and claim xyz is good/bad. Too me it seems more like religions (being a Keynesian, Austrian, etc), where people search for facts that confirm their positions.

The problem with most macroeconomic theories is that they ignore too many important details.

So for example, you can borrow money to invest in the future which is usually good in the long run, or you can spend it on things you don't need such as hosting international sports competitions, ineffective military equipment, ... This means you can come to completely different conclusions as to the effectiveness of government spending. In the words of Warren Buffet, we don't talk about 'quality' of GDP enough.

There's a nice paper by Mankiw on the topic of science vs engineering in economics:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w12349

mohawkon Why Water Is Wet

The strength of hydrogen bonding in the original answer refers to the strength relative to other kinds of molecules. It is kind of implicit in the question that we are at room temperature, or more precisely a state where water is liquid.

mohawkon How to receive a million packets per second

Have a look at Gentoo, it's only been around for 13 years...

mohawkon Why we should't judge a country by its GDP

A small aside to your comment: GDP can be measured accurately, but sometimes it isn't. Some recent prominent examples are from Africa:

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/nov/20/economics-gh...

mohawkon A Surprise for Evolution in Giant Tree of Life

Just look at those graphs of distributions for speciation times. Reading the description of the "speciation clock", i would have imagined a sharp distribution with a very tall peak at 2 million years. Yes, the mode is about 2 million years. But the distribution is veeery broad. Looking at the graphs, there is no reason to believe that whales and flies have similar speciation times. A very misleading description, unfortunately quite typical of the scientific news cycle.

mohawkon Germans, still outraged by NSA spying, learn their country may have helped

Here is some info on the Sauerland cell of 2007 (unfortunately in German):

http://www.stern.de/panorama/sauerland-zelle-mutmasslicher-c...

Quick summary: The person the people in the Sauerland cell called "boss" and who organised the fuses for them was a "contact person" for MİT (Turkish intelligence org.) and CIA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Intelligence_Organiza...

Background:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_bomb_plot_in_Germany

mohawkon Germans, still outraged by NSA spying, learn their country may have helped

Every time we hear about a new scandal in our German secret services, i await the news of another terrorist cell to be busted. I am rarely disappointed. Cynical me imagines a little cottage industry inside the secret services, always with a small queue of potential terrorists that their handlers can then push further on short notice. These terrorists can then be raided and presented to the public, reinvigorating our fear and making us think that the deep state is the lesser of two evils. And then, after a few weeks, it is back to business as usual.

mohawkon Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++

Merkel is the exception to the rule, though. Here is an article on the composition of the German parliament:

http://www.dw.de/few-entrepreneurs-in-new-german-parliament/...

More than half are administrators (probably civil servants i think), teachers, lawyers.

mohawkon Prime Minister of Singapore Coded Sudoku Solver in C++

Generalising a bit, it seems to me that in Asia a lot of political leaders come from engineering, whereas in the US and Europe many come from the humanities, especially law.

mohawkon Warren Buffett Just Wrote His Best Annual Letter

The marketing of that website is that they don't waste money.

mohawkon Colour Symbolism in Ancient Mesopotamia

With regard to Homeric interpretation of colour, i found this interesting.

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bodysphere/feat...

Some of the comments are interesting as well, such as that Homer might have been blind.