Viewing profile — covidacct

Xi Jingping consolidated power by rallying people around the flag of anti-corruption. Same with Putin. Obviously, neither of those people is anywhere close to non-corrupt. Don't ra…

OT, but does anyone know where the "learnings" phrase in corporatese come from? I noticed it five or six years ago and now it's everywhere. The first time I heard it was from a Ger…

Seems tautological, especially for a platform biz. Companies that don't "aggregate demand" fail because "aggregating demand" is just a fancy way of saying "have a critical mass of …

> Is there some realistic path for me to escalate? Is the instructor an ad junct? Those are cheap and replaceable. They make maybe ~1/10th of what your average FAANG engineer makes…

I'm mostly on board with the critique of university rankings, but I really don't buy this specific critique. It's a strawman. Here's what they did: they took the top research unive…

> They accept the risk and willing to trade the cost with the benefit. This is only true at the very beginning of a smoker's habit. I know a lot of smokers. Exactly zero of them ar…

Counter-point: The "everyone needs ridiculous amount of driveway space" rule existed in a suburb I lived in. We had exceptionally wide streets, but parking any car in the street fo…

> Roads bridges See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public%E2%80%93private_partner... > healthcare The large healthcare providers are already run like private businesses, because the…

> But you can't just move your entire country onto solar power If oil consumption enters extreme secular decline and SA doesn't transition to solar, then SA will be a horrendously …

> Private capital, during the same time frame, gave us google search and maps, smartphones, movies on demand and god knows how much other stuff I was perhaps too coy. https://www.n…

Here's one teeny tiny example. They made a smart investment, to the tune of billions of dollars, in computer science. And not just for the past 30 years, but continuously for the p…

Federal and state governments are different.

From my original post: Governments DID see this coming, both federal and state. California, at one time, was prepared for exactly this crisis. The 2008 financial crisis wiped out s…

> I expect this essay to be the target of criticism. Here’s a modest proposal to my critics. Instead of attacking my ideas of what to build, conceive your own! What do you think we…

This talk is an amusing aside. I think the other posters are bit harsh for a talk that's clearly meant to be taken in that way. If you're interested in actual psychology of program…

Corporate debt

I implemented neural networks before the advent of the good python frameworks. It sucked. And CNNs existed for decades before AlexNet. Honestly, the software and hardware engineers…

Yup, I absolutely agree. Almost all big leaps in software engineering and applied computer science come from building a powerful and simple abstraction. Powerful and simple abstrac…

It's a huge amount of code, hidden behind the tensorflow import statements. It's common to credit GPUs for the rapid spread of deep learning, but good GPUs were available for quite…

The ability of workers to capture their own productivity gains is a lower than it's been in a century. This crisis will push the second derivative lower.

I've never understood why high-quality chairs were ever symbols of excess. Ask anyone with bad sciatica how much they spend on PT a year. It's probably several multiples of the cos…

The idea of defining a set of transition rules and then analyzing the properties of some closure (e.g., think reflexive and transitive) of those rules. For transition rules of vari…

The question you're asking requires non-trivial effort to answer precisely because "emulation cone" and "rulial space" are never quite all the way defined, and the question being a…

To avoid redundant threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22871806