qubax

> The Economist had an article about this issue recently and they concluded that the main effect of Index Funds was to drive low-performance fund managers out of business.

If that's the case it should drive most fund managers out of business since most of them don't beat the S&P over time.

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/27/active-fund-managers-rarely-...

And as more money gets funneled to index funds, the vanguards and fidelitys of the world could lower fees on their index funds which should put even more pressure on most fund managers which could create a vicious cycle. Maybe we'll be left with just index funds and a handful of rock star fund managers.

> Matt Levine is not a clickbait writer

Come on. Enough of this. For some odd reason, every week there is a levine article here and every time someone goes out of their way to praise levine. The guy works for bloomberg. Clickbait is part of nature of the beast whether you think levine is great or not. Is levine a writer or a cult leader. What's with all the worship?

Help help, I'm being repressed! See the violence inherent in the system.

God I love that movie.

Like all quotes, on first glance it appears insightful and impressive, but a closer second look reveals it to be nonsense.

> Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence.

Luck and circumstance can.

> Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts.

The world is also full of persistent failures as well.

> Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

The Axis powers in ww2 were as persistent and determined as the allies. You could argue they were even more persistent and determined. They failed. Has there been a more persistent and determined presidential candidate than Hillary Clinton? She failed twice. If persistence was all it took, Hillary would have been president.

People love to pat themselves on the back for their successes. If coolidge was born into a black family in the 1800s rather than into an elite new england family, I wonder how much persistence and determination would have mattered.

Persistence is an important characteristic in life, but there are far more to success than persistence.

> It's been a few years I've given up on the idea of privacy with technology.

The problem with tech is that it's modularity and dependency on other people/tools/hardware/etc ultimately requires trust.

> in place for more than 20 years.

Far longer than 20 years. The idea of trust, privacy and security has been discussed for a long time. The complexity of security on just on one specific technology ( compilers ) was discussed in the early 1980s by Ken Thompson.

"Reflections on Trusting Trust"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13569275

Compilers are just one part of a complex ecosystem. Now imagine having to check ABI or the physical chips/hardware themselves. Where you require sophisticated hardware.

The motto of technology is "In Trust We Trust".

> We already do that with our voices....

But that requires one side speaking. If they refuse to speak, then we can't know their thoughts. And people can also tell lies with their voices. Now if we could somehow interface directly with the brain...

Voice is like an API the person provides to others. Like twitter's API for users access data. But twitter can shut down the API or manipulate their API to show us what they want us to see. But imagine if you had direct link to their database?

Watchdog groups should only exist for a short period of time and for a specific purpose. If it is open ended, it will inevitable arrive at an extreme.

In a sexist society, if I was paying you to find sexism against women, you'd be able to find obvious examples of it. But as society changes and societal sexism against women disappears, what are you left to do? You still have to find examples of sexism to justify your job. Imagine in your quarterly report, you tell your boss there is no more sexism. Well then, your boss might think, well why is your position need any more? But you like your job and the easy paycheck. So you are now incentivized to see sexism where none exists.

> Is Breitbart the only source of "right wing" facts in your world?

Breitbart isn't "only source" for anything. But it is one of the largest news sites that a lot of people read.

> Furthermore if you'd actually read the article you'd see that they also ban "left wing" site of similar quality.

Firstly, I don't want any legit sites banned. Period. Especially because they lean a certain way politically. Secondly, if that's the case, 99% of the news sites ( including nytimes, cnn all the way to vox and buzzfeed ) would have to be banned. But I highly doubt that is happening.

You seem to think I hold breitbart in high esteem. I don't. I think it is mostly toxic rubbish like the nytimes, washingtonpost, foxnews, msnbc, cnn, etc. They all are biased political advocacy groups. But I don't want them censored. Especially from something like wikipedia ( which I used to value and trust ).

The reason why I trusted wikipedia is because they were trying to be objective as possible. Now, it's clear that they, like many other institutions, are getting highly political. That's not a good thing.

So it'll be all left wing from here on out then? I don't think wikipedia realizes how close they are to irrelevance. With google, facebook, etc lowering wikipedia's priority and with wikipedia's recent move towards a particular ideology, they are really losing their credibility and visibility. Just another in a long series of promising tech institutions that are failing miserably.

> That's not BS.

It is BS.

> a) most Americans don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for a living

No. Most american don't want to do back-breaking manual labor for peanuts. As maerF0x0 said, raise the wages and watch how many americans love back-breaking manual labor. It's strange how the tar oil fields in south dakota are able to attract workers from all over the country.

> and b) most Americans also want food to be cheap.

Don't all humans?

Why? We lead the world in software by a long margin. It's one of the reasons english is the lingua franca of software development. As for electric cars, it's only the US and the chinese who are heavily invested in it. The japanese have a presence in EVs but they are more heavily invested in hydrogen cars.

I'm not scared. Bring it on.

Edit (2:18): Got the alert right on schedule. Freaky.

> It's the best capitalised YC company.

"YC doesn't hold shares in Cruise anymore, since the company as a whole was sold to GM for 1 billion in 2016.".

It's no longer a YC company.

Could've just linked to the actual source.

https://www.nobelprize.org

https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/chemistry/2018/press-relea...

> Curious... I always read 'America' when people from USA talks about them.

Not just americans talking about the USA. Most of the world. From Britain to Japan, america is used to denote the US and americans to denote citizens from the US.

> What about the people from the rest of the continent?

North Americans ( for US + Canada ). South Americans for people in south america. There are even Central Americans for everyone in between.

In a geographical sense, mexico is also included when people talk about North Americans ( like NAFTA for example ). But from a cultural or general use, north americans primarily mean americans and canadians.

Every post about google, facebook or privacy, there is a PR comment about Apple.

Apple doesn't care about privacy any more than google believed in "do no evil". They collect data on you just like google does. They buy data from other vendors like google does. They sell data on you.

The idea that a company who gives data to the chinese government cares about privacy is laughable.

http://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-apple-china...

You shouldn't confine yourself to an "ecosystem" controlled by one company. Be that google or apple.

This isn't new. It's been going on since the end of gilded age with wealthy tycoons setting up family run charities and foundations. Rockefeller, Carnegie, etc all did this. Gates is the most famous one to do this in recent times.

It's a great way to shelter money from taxes and governments. It has been used to fund worthwhile enterprises. But it could also be used to give wealthy families political/institutional power for generations.

> Sure, C is great in its simplicity but the world has moved on to safer more powerful languages.

Sure, we have more type safe languages. But I wouldn't call one language "more powerful" than another. Certainly Rust isn't "more powerful" than C. They are both turing complete and equally "powerful".

C and systems programming to learn how software works.

Paraphrasing Churchill:

I would make them all learn [python|java|ruby|etc]: and then I would let the clever ones learn C as an honor, and assembly [MASM|NASM|GAS|etc] as a treat.

An educated person should know a bit of latin and ancient greek. And educated computer science person should know C and assembly.

> It is on track to end civilization as we know it within two generations.

The reason why so many people don't take climate change seriously is because of extreme hyperbole like this. Climate change is outdoing even the "peak oil" craze of the past. If you think civilization is going to end in 40 years ( 2 generations ), then you leave no room for debate.

> A rational society would think about nothing else.

No. A rational society would think about lots of other things. Zealots think about nothing else.

Climate change is going to create challenges and opportunities. The societies/people better able to adapt will thrive. Others won't.

> Real estate bubbles rarely burst unless there is accompanying unemployment. The reason is psychological, people hate realizing a loss.

Real estate bubbles generally burst when buy side gets squeezed. It doesn't matter if people sell homes and realize losses. The bursting of bubbles isn't a supply or sell side issue. It's a demand or buy side issue.

But there are many ways the demand side can be squeezed. The most prominent is increasing interest rates. Then there is unemployment as you noted during economic downturns. There are also legal methods - draconian anti-buyer laws. Imagine if a law was passed that banned sale of homes to foreigners and even gave foreigners 3 months to divest all property in X market. Not only would that burst the bubble, it would crash the housing market.

Bubbles form when the demand side is artificially increased while limiting supply side. For example, if you granted citizenship to foreigners if they buy a house. That would spike the demand for homes but the supply of homes wouldn't increase as quickly.

There are a myriad of reasons why bubbles form and why bubbles burst. Ultimately it's the manipulation of supply and demand sides which causes one or the other.

The "higher" the language and more declarative. "Higher" because all the lower level work of data structures/etc are taken care of or even embedded into the language itself. "Declarative" because in declarative languages you just express what you want, not how to get it ( which imperative languages have to do ).

Compare "SELECT * FROM TBL1" with what you would need to do in an imperative language.

You would have to open data connection, set up data structures and have to specify step by step what you want. Even if you had libraries doing most of the work, you would still need to specify step by step what you want to be done. Whereas with SQL, you specify what you want and let the language/interpreter/optimizer/engine figure out the rest.

That's only considering "number of characters". Now if you measured "executable size" or memory size or any other impact, it might be different.

[dupe]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18120433

> In practical terms, imagine all humans have similar potential.

We should imagine all humans have the same rights, but not the same potential. If we all had similar potential, then we would all have the same shot at being top physicists, NBA players or chess grandmasters. But we don't.

We know that all humans don't have similar potential because there are women only sporting events. We created women's soccer and women's tennis and women's golf precisely because we acknowledge that all humans don't have similar potential.

> Of course, if you cling to the notion that women are not capable enough of doing this demanding intellectual work and should rather stick to doing menial labor

But most menial labor is done by males - especially the dangerous ones? Why are you so fixated on physics? Why aren't you demanding women go into garbage collecting, logging, steel work, etc which are some of the most dangerous and most male fields?

> surely it must be a fantastically rare statistical anomaly to have a woman win the most prestigious scientific accolade, and thus mentioning it in the title makes complete sense.

Can you please not do this? This type of feminism ( especially coming from a male ) comes off just as badly as chauvanism and extremely patronizing.

If you truly believe what you say, why aren't you out there protesting women's world cup or any women specific sporting event? All humans have the same potential right?

Also your argument would make sense if the west still discriminated against women. We haven't for quite a long time. As a matter of fact, we have had programs and scholarships specifically to encourage women to go into male dominated fields for generations. And yet, women choose not to? Should we force women to go into these fields since encouraging and giving them a choice certainly isn't working.

> Churchill was a notorious scoundrel

The topic of churchill was the first time I realized I lived in a bubble. In the US, we laud churchill as a great statesman and take pride in that he's half-american by his american mother. He's seen as, next to FDR, the most important man in the fight against nazi germany to free europe. And naively we assume the rest of the world also loves churchill. Turns out much of the world hates churchill because the guy was virulently racist, genocidal and a war criminal. The things churchill said and did were no different than what hitler said and did. The first time I heard my indian colleague say something negative about churchill, I was shocked because I was so conditioned into thinking the guy represented good.

"As the resistance swelled, he announced: "I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion." This hatred killed. To give just one, major, example, in 1943 a famine broke out in Bengal, caused – as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proved – by the imperial policies of the British. Up to 3 million people starved to death while British officials begged Churchill to direct food supplies to the region. He bluntly refused. He raged that it was their own fault for "breeding like rabbits". At other times, he said the plague was "merrily" culling the population."

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/not-his-fines...

Were it not for the unprecedented horrors of hitler, churchill would rank up there with the worst of the leaders of the 20th century.

> I can't see how it's worth close to $800 million either.

It's worth $800 million because someone was willing to buy it for $800 million. Why is anything worth anything? Because someone is willing to pay for it.

> isn't ads to kids illegal in most countries?

What? Then how does nickelodean, toys stores, kids clothes store, etc exist? I can assure you that ads to kids are most definitely legal in most countries. We have back-to-school sales and of course we have christmas.

> And even if it's legal, how moral is it?

What's immoral about it? Targetting adult specific ( cigarettes, alcohol ) to kids shouldn't be allowed, but what's immoral about targeting age specific products to kids?

You sound like people saying kids shouldn't be taught about sex education, learn about violent news, etc. Kids and everyone should be taught about ads and adults should help kids deal with ads because ads are a part of life and they are going to have to deal with it eventually. Rather than ads themselves, I think the lack of educating kids about ads is the problem. But lots of backwards controlling parents want to keep children uninformed and naive and ill prepared for real life.

It's far simpler than having to teach all the prey animals ( from rodents, to birds, to snakes, to reptiles, etc ) to learn a behavior.

It's not like we don't have experience wiping out animals before. The only reason it isn't done is because the naive minded will cry about the poor cats.

> Proof by insistence?

Proof by statistics and facts. Hardly any women went to college back then. So that's about 50% of the population who were less educated. Thrown in minorities who were discouraged from getting an education, it's statistical fact.

Perhaps if you bothered to read my comment rather than jumping to complain about your students...

"Strange to think that people are nostalgic for an era were women ( half the population ) were discouraged from going to college and minorities were denied equal access to education."

> When you see the written reports the kids produce at my university you can only disagree violently.

Sure, the overall quality of the student body is lower because far more people attend college. But overall, the education level is higher collectively.

Also, instead of blaming technology, have you considered the quality of educators have declined markedly?

What exactly would be "copernican" about it? Also 3 of the 4 "copernican" revolutions outlined have nothing to do with copernics. Even copernicus's "revolution" was just a rehash of ancient greek idea of heliocentrism ( aristarchus of samos ).

Seems like pointless temporary exercise not even based in science. Even if you "teach" the current batch of rodents to be afraid of cats, how will their offspring be afraid of cats if they aren't naturally inclined to be fearful of predators?

The way prey behavior is developed in nature is through evolution. In a batch of animals, there are mutations that cause a small portion of them to be naturally antsy, cautious and afraid. You could see this in litter of puppies. There are some who are very friendly, some that are neutral and some who stand back and are cautious. Same with rats and other rodents. When predators get introduced, the "friendly" ones get killed and the more cautious rodents get to breed, producing more and more cautious rodents over time. It's basic evolution. Of course with the introduction of human supported "super-predators" like cats doesn't give species time to "evolve".

Isn't the simple and obvious solution here is to remove feral cats and other non-native predators? Or are feel-good but ineffective "predator boot camps" where preservation is at right now?