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mousa

291 karma · joined December 10, 2010

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mousa··on Intel CEO’s Stock Sales May Warrant SEC Examination
I think the disclosure procedures were abandoned because people outside of the loop had figured it out from Linux kernel upgrades.
mousa··on Google increasingly is promoting a single answer for many questions
Why shouldn't they? I personally like the answers and use them often if I'm trying to find a fact, like when someone famous was born. If someone is going to blindly trust Google without verifying and google doesn't try to answer, they'll probably just trust whatever site is listed first anyways...

I see no harm in Google guessing.

mousa··on Rising Rents Are Pushing More Tenants Past the Breaking Point
Probably doesn't hurt business as the new people who rent there will have more money
mousa··on A Grain That Tastes Like Wheat, but Grows Like a Prairie Grass
>more irregular in size than wheat berries

Wheat is one of those plants that humans have mastered. One person can farm thousands of acres of wheat. Generally that's only true of plants that are very uniform and that you wipe out each harvest. It would be very hard to replace it with a plant you can't use the same techniques on as the labor would be 100x probably.

mousa··on Google Has Made a Mess of Robotics
There is one tiny little mention of Waymo in there but that's clearly the main push for Google in robotics now, and if that's where those robotics aquihires went maybe that's what they wanted.
mousa··on DuckDuckGo vs Google
Noone in the world thinks Baidu gives good results.
mousa··on DuckDuckGo vs Google
It would make it hard to pretend that the DDG results were much better than those irrelevant Google results that more fanatical Googlephobes insist they get.
mousa··on How to conduct a good programming interview
Can't really blame him, it might seem kind of arrogant to refuse to do the task they give and propose one yourself, although it is pretty impressive that you could do something useful on a codebase you haven't seen during the code interview.
mousa··on San Francisco hits 106 degrees, breaking record
It doesn't feel that bad either. I thought I'd be miserable but this dry heat is painless compared to 90s in the East.
mousa··on Americans Are Dying Younger, Saving Corporations Billions
You don't get a new bike every year. You're talking about a 1 time payment for all 65+. After that just give it to everyone who turns 65.
mousa··on The Google memo isn’t sexist or anti-diversity, it’s science
The way it was published does not lead me to believe that story. The link to the document riffed on documents whose authors want all Googlers to read them and fix their broken ways.
mousa··on A Googler's Anti-Diversity Screed Reveals Tech's Rotten Core
Where did the author get the idea this was anonymous or posted as a meme?
mousa··on [dead]
maybe not going to happen, seems like most googlers disagree with the doc but more so with the leaks
mousa··on Truckers Working Alongside Coders Trying to Make Driverless Trucks
I`m sure The first driverless cars for the public will start being available for rides in Silicon Valley or AZ and just on the regular roads they know very very well. I've still never seen one on the highway.
mousa··on Self-driving cars don't care about your moral dilemmas
I don't see why automated vehicles would cause this redesign to happen when human drivers haven't.
mousa··on Ask HN: Your optimal way to start Computer Science?
Are you sure they want robotics rather than pure software? For the longest time I was really put off of programming because of all the libraries and magic going on and people trying to show me the "cool stuff." It was cool stuff but I could never really get into it because I never felt I had a good feel of what was going on and there were so many components involved. I think if I was introduced to competitive programming earlier I would have loved it. Nothing messy to think about but the problems themselves and some kids might be motivated by the competition or puzzleness of it.
mousa··on Alienation Is Killing Americans and Japanese
I live in the south and even here a ton of the churches are ok with LGBTQ and don't harp on guilt or how we all need to be saved. Unitarians, Episcopalean, Presbyterian (USA), Quakers, etc. It's still hard to sit through a service where you don't believe anything.
mousa··on Unnecessariat
Of course there is work to be done. It's just work that a smaller and smaller percentage of the most competent people + technology can be useful in. This isn't just an issue of providing more training resources, technology allows people more access to the work of the most competent so there is less and less work for people who are not the best at things or capable of learning really quickly to fill the new wide open niches that are popping up before technology narrows them too.
mousa··on Unnecessariat
No economic use is not oblivion. Being useless needs to somehow be destigmatized while not being encouraged. It's not the end of the world, there are happy monks who live in seclusion off the generosity of others, there are some happy people with special needs who we don't try to make work and retired people who still enjoy life. There's no reason we can't have people being happy doing hobbies some day if we can get past training ourselves to feel like shit when we're not doing useless but socially necessary work (which is what most jobs are rapidly turning into). Some country is going to implement basic income and force us to talk about these ideas that successful people feel we can keep pushing away because it doesn't affect us yet.
mousa··on Pycraft: Minecraft engine in Python
What abstraction? Comparisons are ubiquitous, easy to read, and a one-liner as well. If the range were to change it could affect performance. I've never seen anything written like the original loop, it's not like it's a Python idiom or anything. I'd say it's the wrong way to do things.
mousa··on The American Economy Is in a Funk, But Not for the Reasons We Think
Those kinds of technologies are coming at a faster pace too. But the fact you discount search engines and cell phones kind of shows how fast new technologies are moving. They're on the same scale as cotton gins but we don't have decades to marvel at how they were gamechangers because they seem like nothing a couple years after they are invented and there is so much more going on.
mousa··on The American Economy Is in a Funk, But Not for the Reasons We Think
25 years from now is forever in biological engineering. It's crazy to think noone knew much about CRISPR 4 years ago, now it's used everywhere. It's like that in other fields too.

The things AI is able to do is growing rapidly too. Nothing looks like a big deal to the Freakonomics guy because the next thing comes out so quickly and replaces it that it doesn't seem like a big development, whereas we had decades to admire and reflect upon what a big deal our cars and light bulbs were.

mousa··on By gum, the West is wrong about Singapore
A lot of those 1% would be executed for their crimes in Singapore. They aren't in prison because they know the severity of the punishments and thus avoid the crimes.
mousa··on “So many people spend their working lives doing jobs they think are unnecessary”
There are jobs that are legitimately BS and everyone within the industry knows it but works hard at it anyways because it's their job.

In the investment world there are a lot that come to mind.

A large number of financial advisors' entire job is just sales: they get clients funneled to companies that do the stock picking. They know these companies will not beat the indexes but it's safe, accepted, absolves them somewhat of responsibility when things go south, and these companies give them all the talking points they need to deal with clients efficiently so they can collect more.

Those companies see their job as not being out of line with the stock market indexes. They have to be a little different to justify their existence but not different enough to risk being way short of the benchmark. It is impossible for them to beat the market with their levels of risk aversion + fees, and there is no real incentive to do so. Within these companies, a large majority of the effort therefore goes to marketing to financial advisors trying to get their clients' money.

That's putting aside the question of whether there is any societal value if these RIA's were even trying and succeeding at getting more returns for their clients.

mousa··on $10,000 Apple Watch Edition in Select Retail Stores
My guess is the expensive version is less about being a huge source of revenue and more about emphasizing Apple brand is the brand of the elite.
mousa··on Snowden in talks on returning home: lawyer
I'd be worried about staying in Moscow right now if I were Snowden. Whether true or not, Russian government is acting fully confident that Nemstov was killed as a false flag. If they get a little more angry about accusations the "CIA" might kill Snowden just to prove a point.
mousa··on Russia opposition politician Boris Nemtsov shot dead
Yeah. On the other hand obvious is much more intimidating. It wouldn't be the first time intimidation trumps subtlety for the Kremlin. It's been the MO of many of their governments and Putins as well for example polonium tea.
mousa··on Ask PG: Why don't you allow users to delete HN accounts?
Woah thats some Illuminati stuff
mousa··on The hype over driverless cars: is it overdone?
Even if it's two decades instead of one it is going to be a huge huge change worthy of the hype. There will be huge consequences. For example the job that employs the most Americans is truck driving.
mousa··on Ask HN: Career at Intersection of Econ/CS?
That is probably one of the easiest combinations to get a career right now. Hedge funds, other investment companies, pretty much all the finance industry is on the hunt for people who know a lot of about computer science and have interest in economics or finance. Maybe it's just an east coast thing but it seems like half of job postings for Python are along these lines.
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