tdees40

There's a billion people! You can't make any generalizations about "hard work". It's just overly broad stereotyping at that point.

Do Uighurs value hard work? Tibetans? Subsistence farmers? City-dwellers? I don't really know what people mean when they say that the Chinese "value hard work". Which Chinese?

The US economy did hit a major recession, and Chinese growth slowed marginally, but generally did okay.

I don't mean to eye-roll, but Sam on economics tends to be, well, meh. The thing I always remind people when they say that China will take over the world is that everyone said the same thing about Japan in the 1980s (remember the movie/novel Rising Sun?). What happened?

Well, the mercantilist economic toolkit has an endgame. Neither Sam nor I knows when it's going to let them down, but building an entire economy on cheap labor and radical amounts of investment is hard to sustain. Eventually you need things like domestic demand and that requires wages, which short-circuits the export machine. Japan got caught in that trap, and China will eventually too.

I'd make the argument that Rust is making many of the same mistakes as C++. It's got a kitchen-sink approach that has already accumulated some barnacles, and that ownership system is a mess.

BTW - as someone who's in the financial industry (i.e. not software development), it's shocking to me that companies ask for references from prior employers. Positive feedback is obviously helpful, but there's a huge incentive for false negative feedback. It's just really unimaginable why that would be seen as a reliable source.

This is my primary beef with this post. Keeping silent could punish the people left behind. I've had some bad work scenarios, and the people who said nothing in their exit interview did a great disservice to those who stayed. YMMV, though, I guess.

I get all this, but I really think the only way to sort this out will be to heavily stigmatize it. It needs to be shameful not to vaccinate your child.

I think satire plays into that.

If the Fed were lending gold on a fractional reserve basis, a huge number of people would know about it: employees of the Fed, bankers, counter-parties. Why are all of them keeping silent? Why does the Fed endear such intense (some would say insane) loyalty? How do they cover the tracks of this huge operation (both in terms of people and dollars)?

Also, to believe this you have to postulate that:

1) Employees of the Fed are personally concerned about gold destroying the dollar.

2) They are willing to do something illegal (or at least unauthorized) to protect the dollar.

3) So they came up with a complicated, elaborate plan to manipulate the price of gold down that perfectly plays into the narrative of gold bugs (note the nefarious fractional reserve lending).

It's not impossible!

Sure. Just like "mainstream climate scientists", or "mainstream doctors", amirite?

I think a dinosaur lives in the subways under Manhattan. I would be convinced otherwise only by a full audit of all subway tunnels conducted using a dinosaur scanner (which someone will need to invent).

But seriously, there are lots of things that are hard to prove wrong, but that's hardly a good reason to believe them. In your case, what motive would the Fed have? Has an employee of the Fed (or any other central bank) ever blown the whistle on this massive international conspiracy? If there's no good reason to think something, there really isn't much good reason to spend time proving it wrong.

So here's how this works. Gold bugs are big fans of buying gold. They have lots of gold. Their narrative of the financial system is that gold is the uber-asset that all other assets must be denominated in, and that fiat currency is doomed to collapse. The massive run-up of gold prices during the financial crisis played into this narrative, and despite the fact that mainstream economists, politicians, bankers, etc. still thought of it as a "barbarous relic" (Keynes), gold-bugs saw it as the key to a prosperous economy.

So now, gold prices have been weak for a few years, so they have to come up with a new narrative. And that narrative is global conspiracy. So you get groups like GATA [1] and Zero Hedge [2] pushing various stories about how gold is being squirreled away somewhere mysterious, or prices are being suppressed by faceless multinationals or what-have-you. Maybe it's true! I don't know, but there's never really been any evidence, and it just sounds like someone justifying a failed investment thesis.

[1] www.gata.org [2] zerohedge.com

> "Second, it did so just as the housing fraud and financial insanity which characterized the late 1990s and early 2000s nearly destroyed the U.S. dollar and left us with martial law."

Er, what? Martial law? I guess I wasn't around for that one.

It's really not. Most people would put "Great (father|mother)", "Wonderful Friend", but I suppose that's a value judgment and each has his or her own opinion.

I work in finance, and the process by which senior executives are selected literally screens to ensure assholery. It's like a job requirement.

So there is a basic introduction to generating LLVM in Haskell there, but what's so great about it is that generating a lexer/parser/(interpreter|compiler) is almost magic in Haskell. The total code of that project is remarkably small. For that reason, it's a pretty standard Haskell workflow to do everything in Haskell and then have it emit LLVM/Cuda/whatever to do the heavy-lifting, and then you get to reason in Haskell and your back-end takes care of the rest. As much as that sounds complicated, it's really, really not.

If you haven't spent time with this, you need to stop everything and look at it. It's wonderful.

"There are natural things that will help you get rid of heavy metals. One great one is cilantro (which I personally hate the taste of :P) So add a little more cilantro to your diet, but be careful when you do to also stay well hydrated, as we want the freed up metals to exit your body, not redeposit themselves somewhere in your body less safe (read the brain)."

Maybe this is true, but for now I'm going to give it a citation needed.

Well yes, and I'm no gun-rights advocate (quite the opposite), but approximately 0% of guns (in the US at least) are actually used to kill people, and this is telling me that 80% of dark web activity is used for pedophilia. That seems like a very big deal.

Who has said sorry? Cheney? Bush? Rice? The people who put this system into place continue to defend it and have suffered no consequences.

Note also that pure derivatives quants like (1) are disappearing, and (3) is ascendant due to regulatory concerns (Dodd-Frank, et al).

I'd just point out that Suki Kim's book is really an ethical morass, as you can certainly make the argument that she put the people she used to work with in a terrible position.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/30/world/tales-told-out-of-sc...

That statement assumes interest rates are irrelevant. Sure, if you have a 4% interest rate (the going rate these days), you'll pay 72% more than the value of your house, but that completely ignores the time value of money. A 4% interest rate is pretty great (especially when it's tax deductible!), and just saying that because the undiscounted cash flows that you spend are greater than the initial value of the house means very little.

There's a reasonable argument that the entire industrial revolution was just the result of cheap carbon, and we've been running on that ever since. The Haber Process allowed us to get out of agriculture (and thus have time to make all of these breakthroughs) and then electrification (courtesy coal/gas) got us out of having to do manual labor. So we had lots of free time! And we used that to develop transistors and MRI machines and spaceships and everything else. But the returns to that free time seem to be diminishing rapidly, and we still rely on power growth to get GDP growth.

I talked to a guy who toured SpaceX not too long ago, and he said that Elon Musk had a staff of designers making spacesuits that were more comfortable and stylish. He said that putting on a spacesuit should be as easy as putting on a tuxedo.

When I see things like that, I can't help but think that if you want performance, you've gotta go C.

Otherwise, you get stuff like this, that's just impossible to reason about.

The real question is if buyers will stick around once prices go up. I remember, during the bubble, buy.com's strategy was to sell at a loss, grow customer base and then raise prices. The first two parts worked reasonably well, but once they raised prices, everyone left.

Equally interesting is that they tend to pay them back by hitting up their relatives for cash (which would have probably been a better idea in the first place!).

http://bucks.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/why-borrowers-use-...

Credit isn't for everyone! This is why there are ancient provisions in most religions against lending to the poor.

It rarely helps them and often makes their lives much worse. If they need something so desperately (food, shelter, etc), private charity or government assistance seems like a better means of providing it than payday lenders.

I feel like D's lack of adoption was mostly due to issues around the way things transpired, specifically the closed-source compiler and of course the big mess with the standard library. Otherwise it was well-placed and well-timed, just ill-executed.

Oh my goodness, yes. The HN crowd probably doesn't appreciate the extent to which people who sling C++ at BigCorp are limited by the rules the company sets.