scottmsul

This is incorrect. You agree to trade because you value the food (and eating the food) more than the money. The store agrees to trade because they value the money more than the food. Each side is more satisfied after the trade than before. Hence it's non-zero sum.

Real life wealth distributions have a very interesting property not shown here. The "random give/take" always ends up with an exponential distribution, which models real life for about the bottom 99% and doesn't have any really high values or long tails. However the top 1% follows a power law in real life, which does spread wealth across several orders of magnitude and has long tails, and the transition is very sharp. Presumably this is because the top 1% made their wealth in a way that is scalable, such as though starting businesses, investing, etc. If you search papers in econophysics you can see this effect.

I read through much of this book as a fun hobby/side project. I felt at times this was a book written by a genius for geniuses... For example, there's a chapter on numerics. Simple, right? PG's "example" was a full ray-tracing library in only about three pages. There were single pages that took me an hour to read and understand fully. Very cool/fun stuff, but also extremely terse, especially if you're new to lisp.

I've lived in Boulder for six years now, favorite hike is Long's Peak but it's ridiculously long and strenuous. Some good gems that are not as crazy and out of the national park are the Brainard lake area and the Arapahoe glacier trail if you like meadows above treeline.

While not a unicorn, this could potentially succeed as an indie-hacker sized project. One potential business strategy could be a high-level information hub - a weekly blog + podcast for example. Each week look at a different drug or illness, look at all the relevant papers, do a short statistical analysis, and summarize. Then get some patreons, run ads, maybe sponsorships for particular drugs, etc. I think there's a lot of math geeks out there that would find this useful/interesting enough to follow on a regular basis, even if just to see what's going on in the healthcare space.

This list is hopelessly optimistic but that's part of the fun. If only one of these happen I'll consider this list a success. I remember in 2010 I was sure we'd have full self-driving in all new cars by now since Google had the working prototype, how wrong that was! I also worked on LIGO and knew from the inside there was a good chance of a detection and that it would be mainstream news if it came true, which it did.

Here's my list of things that are theoretically (but barely) reachable by 2020:

- Fully programmable quantum computers. Google finally achieved "quantum supremacy", which isn't useful by itself, but a milestone showing progress. QCs will matter more for simulating quantum dynamics than all the encryption stuff.

- The first human landing on Mars. SpaceX seems to be good at setting aggressive targets, missing them, but then hitting them eventually. At the time of this writing they claim the first manned mission will be in 2024, so likely it will happen ~2028.

- A working prototype of an energy-positive fusion reactor. There was some good progress by the team at MIT by using a new type of superconducting tape that can handle significantly stronger magnetic fields.

It wouldn't be the government but the CCP. The CCP pretty much has ultimate authority on everything, so there's probably some close ties between people in Bitmain and people in the CCP that don't exist with MicroBT. Also a lot of it is based around favors more generally not just money.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanxi

Still seems a bit far from replacing jet engines? This article was going on about fuel emissions in the entire aviation industry, this is just an electric propeller. Anyone know how far we are from electric jets? Is such a thing even possible?

I can't help but wonder if the "Golden Years" is just selection bias. CEOs who are under-performing years 6-10 will get fired or step down, and only the really good ones will make it to 11+ years.

Everyone here's talking about Uber, I would guess most of the unintended consequences will be less visible. Smaller companies, freelancers, independent contractors, consultants, that whole ecosystem might undergo a chilling effect.

Radar spoofing, it's mentioned in the second link. But the author admits it's only a guess.

I think there's probably something to the UFO phenomenon. However I'm convinced Bob Lazar is a fraud. It's a tricky case because certain parts of his story are verifiable, like that he worked at Los Alamos and that his friends did see a moving light in the sky. The best explanation I've seen is here:

http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange...

http://www.otherhand.org/home-page/area-51-and-other-strange...

The explanation is he worked on particle accelerators as a mechanic (not a physicist), and they were shooting particle beams into the sky. However since this is all likely classified he would be forced to stick to his UFO story.

> The central banks normally determine only the short term interest rates (up to 3-6 months).

But if the short-term rates are manually set by central banks to be artificially low, wouldn't that be the primary driver behind negative long-term interest rates even if the exact number is determined by supply and demand? The article is talking about natural drivers like "negative time preference" which just sounds wrong.

My understanding is that interest rates were cut originally in order to provide a "safe landing" instead of a "sharp drop" after the last economic crisis (and that they were left low since then). If interest rates are imposed externally by Central Banks instead of by a free market, how do we know what the natural rate would be? Do Central Banks attempt to adjust interest rates towards the natural rate or is it in some sense completely arbitrary/detached?

I was physics/CS undergrad and did very well academically. I didn't really take notes much though. The strategy that worked for me was to read the book ahead of time, then the lectures were more to help digest material I was already familiar with. And for those giant auditorium-sized lecture classes, I just skipped class completely and only read the book. In fact I found taking notes to be distracting - how can I pay attention when I'm trying to copy everything down?

I thought only income could be taxed? If you have valuables just sitting there, how can they be taxed? Obviously if you sell them there might be capital gains, but not before?

I taught myself Dvorak my first year in undergrad. It definitely felt easier to type, but as soon as I went to physics lab I realized I couldn't use the lab computer! I have stuck to Qwerty since then.

When your children go to school, do you think using Dvorak will make it easier or harder to use school computers?

Reading it I can't really sympathize with the author too much. Having affairs doesn't speak much to her character. Neither does staying home and pretending to be on Skype.

Because of that I'm somewhat skeptical of some of her claims. For example:

>The people I worked with were extremely closed minded. Most of them with many years of experience working in a corporation, so even more closed minded, only caring about their manager’s approval.

If these co-workers or managers could share their side, what would they say? Your manager is the one giving your performance reviews, bonuses, promotions, etc. If you worked hard to deliver good results, could that be interpreted as "sucking up to your boss?"

I'd be much more afraid of a government cracking down on gossip than a little gossip...

If you put a negative mass and positive mass side by side and release from rest, they will accelerate indefinitely and break conservation of energy. Of course science should be open to any possibility, no matter how strange. But I feel the author understates its strangeness. And requiring negative mass to be continually created makes this theory not all that much "simpler" than the standard dark matter+dark energy.

> SpaceX can take far more cargo to space, but Rocket Lab is pitching its nimbleness and low-cost as ways to give new customers access to space and to do so on a more convenient schedule.

Weren't small low-cost launches the original goal of SpaceX? I recall Elon saying there wasn't actually that much demand, which is why they were forced to scale up in the first place. Has the market changed recently for small low-cost launches?

In cosmology, there's a parameter called "curvature". If the curvature were slightly less than 1, the topology would be "closed", meaning it would be finite, and traveling in a straight line ends back where you started. This is like the surface of the Earth, but in 3 dimensions instead of 2. Triangle angles add up to greater than 180 degrees. If the curvature were equal to 1, the universe would be "flat", meaning it would be infinite and triangles would add up to 180. If the curvature were greater than 1, it would be "hyperbolic", meaning it would be infinite and triangles would add up to less than 180.

If I recall correctly, currently the best measurement of the curvature is 1 +/- .02, so it's probably flat. What's interesting is if the shape was flat and the universe were truly infinite, there would be an infinite number of perfect copies of Earth, the closest of which would be within 10^10^23 meters, as noted by Max Tegmark (source: http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/crazy.html)

> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive?

I too would like to know the answer to this question. I suspect it may have to do with low interest rates and easily available credit. For example, if buyers are willing to get a 50 year mortgage instead of a 20 year mortgage (and banks are willing to lend it), prices will increase to match demand.

A cool idea would be to split the class into groups where they pass around a piece of paper and can add their group's block and pass to the next group.

This is my all-time favorite Haskell resource: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell

Just jump to the bottom and go through as many pages as possible. Going through Functors, Applicatives, and only then Monads puts everything in a broader context and makes Monads easier to understand.

Exactly. Why replace one government mandate with another? Let the company decide its own objectives, instead of "must maximize returns for shareholders" or "must give employees a voice of x%". If it worked in the 80s, why wouldn't it work today?

I was a physics TA in grad school. I was very good at explaining solutions to problems, so of course during exam reviews I would get big crowds to watch the explanations. I was also somewhat aware of this principle, so during a review I was trying to get students to come up with approaches or ideas while solving a problem, and they demanded "why don't you just tell us!" It was pretty frustrating.

Watching someone explain solutions well can be dangerous, since it gives you the very real feeling of understanding, without actual understanding. To actually understand, you have to try a problem from scratch. Then you will understand why the solution/approach is what it is, and why other approaches fail, which will give you intuition about which approaches work on future problems. But counter-intuitively, you will get lost in the weeds during the process, which makes you feel like you don't understand!

Scores are defined such that 100 is always the current average. But you can compare results to the actual questions today from a decade ago, and see what IQ people today would have gotten back then. This tells you how much IQ has drifted.

IQ used to go up a couple points each decade (known as the Flynn Effect), but this result shows that in more recent times it has been going down.

> Out of the ­10,000 news stories you may have read in the last 12 months, did even one allow you to make a better decision about a serious matter in your life,

Yes, there was an article on HN a couple weeks ago. Pork treated with nitrates increases the chance of colon cancer as much as smoking increases the chance of lung cancer (but pork treated with salt is ok).

The real deal is here, from MIT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkpqA8yG9T4

Apparently there was a recent breakthrough in superconductors, which allows significantly more current in the inductor coils while still maintaining superconductivity. This in turn allows for much stronger magnetic fields, hence tighter confinement of the plasma and therefore more fusion. A standard tokamak with these new superconductors should produce more energy out than energy in, and be a viable source of energy.