Viewing profile — Sherlock

Agree, the book "Programming Bitcoin" by Song provides a detailed explanation of the algorithm.

Disagree with prosecuting drones instead of people actually giving orders.

This is the clearest signal to tell apart people who have studied applied math and people that haven't.

Fun fact: a big chunk of the lithium produced in the world is extracted from the Salar de Atacama: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salar_de_Atacama The method is to concentrate the l…

"The Magicians", "The Magician King", "The Magician's Land" - Lev Grossman. 4/5 "Inside Job" - Connie Willis. 4/5 "Norwegian Wood (Tokio Blues)" - Haruki Murakami. 4/5 "Old Man's W…

Automating the confection of clothes is VERY challenging from an engineering point of view. We need far better robots to automate that.

Care to give some recommendations for a newcomer to that genre?

Accounting doesn't work that way. You can have huge profits and reinvest them, but your income statement will show the profits in any case. Yes, Amazon could be more profitable wit…

The "Original Sin" of not Governments not being able to get debt in the same currency they are able to collect taxes. So, when the main source of USD suffers in some sense (export …

What's interesting from a game theory point of view is to have so many different parties with a FPTP electoral system. You would expect a two party system.

The Economist published an interesting report about that some months ago. The main takeaways were that (1) Argentine was rich, but lagged behind its money-peers in human developmen…

The article doesn't mention the other obvious comparisons, the non-black latin american countries, such as Argentina and Chile. For instance, Chile ranks higher than the US here, d…

When banks go down they take down the economy with them; that's what 'too big to fail' means. It's not worth all the human suffering caused by a depression instead of a recession j…

In Chile the State pays for it. The upward limit on the payment OTOH is quite low (<US$2k/month) but most employers choose to supplement the State payment with the balance of your …

That's a common (notation-induced) mistake. You just need to solve a linear system.

I would really like to read about the compact cassette design history. It's a really remarkable product in which you can appreciate a long list of trade-offs made by the designer(s…

That's strikingly accurate.

This looks about right for any kind of business, not just software development.

That's true. This should have two axes (at least). One with "domain specific knowledge" and other one with "programming expertise". Indeed, when domain experts reach some arbitrary…

This is the usual practice here in Chile, and I don't expect it to change.

Wow, my dad bought an Apple //c when I was around 4 y.o. and it was kept at home until I was ~8, but I couldn't remember seeing a cassette port. At least I'm at peace now.

According to my experience, in Santiago the food and general bills are pricier and housing is cheaper compared with the rest of latam (Colombia, Argentina, Peru). The most expensiv…

The problem with Argentina is doing business there. Education could be better, and the country is gorgeous, but their business practices are terrible. And the government really doe…

MS. McArdle is a journalist with strong insights in tech and finance. Her blog is a good read, if you skip the politics content, which isn't so bad either.

That's standard practice for the mobile plans here in Chile. Such bandwidth for the first xxx Mb, 32kbps after that.