Viewing profile — d_burfoot

Tip for smart science-y young people: think about a career in experimental physics. Experimental data is the complement of theoretical power. Since theory can be provided cheaply b…

> the more you spent building A.I. infrastructure, the more you would earn, or so the logic went. Computer theorists called it the scaling hypothesis. Good Gell-Mann Amnesia moment…

Every single knowledge worker is going to face this kind of crisis. It will be worse for people who cared deeply about their craft, but the crisis will have the same shape. The way…

A good puzzle for political philosophers: how do you build a decent system of government in a world where people to not listen to reasoned arguments?

It is going to be a big problem for humanity when the superintelligent AIs start telling us that our political philosophies, to which everyone is deeply and emotionally attached, a…

> What possible use could there be for doing this? The point is to generate an enormous unlabeled dataset. Historically, ML for medical imaging depended on a small number of labele…

There's a kind of Efficient Market Hypothesis of career advice that I wish PG took better notice of. If a career path (e.g. startup founder) outperforms at time T1, then this fact …

The people of the town decided they'd rather have $10M and $3M/year instead of some random extra parkland. That money is significant for a small, non-wealthy Texas town. Also, ther…

39T is just the outstanding value of all the Treasury instruments (T-bills, etc). The entitlement programs (SSA and Medicare) have made commitments to certain levels of service and…

> Firms in the broad Russell 3000 share index have a total market value of $79trn I sometimes try to get people to worry about the catastrophic state of American public finances by…

It's a poignant piece, but I feel that HN should have some stories of soaring enthusiasm, optimism, and visions of a spectacular future, to counterbalance the doom and gloom.

The buy/rent decision is quite complex for many reasons, but two overlooked factors are: 1) When a bank loans you $1e6 to buy a house, they are effectively deputizing you to act as…

Many commenters seem to be appealing to an almost religious defense of present political borders. That attitude is untenable: there is nothing sacred about national boundaries, the…

Historians will tell you that in many ways, agriculture was the worst thing that ever happened to humanity. Agriculture meant hard, back-breaking, monotonous labor; it meant pests …

I'll accept your first sentence for the sake of argument. You are still better off with a localist / federalist approach, because state governments are much less vulnerable to corr…

America cannot, as a country, discover a reasonable approach to managing health care costs because Americans do not have a sufficient core set of shared political values. The solut…

I'm not sure if this is the direction the OP is going, but I would love to see a world where local small-time investors can get a bank loan, rent a facility, set up a bunch of comp…

Many Americans do not realize how much money the US government spends. When you include all three levels, it comes to $32K/person/year [0]. This is much higher than countries that …

> So just manual memory management with extra steps This is actually the perfect situation: you are allowed to do it carefully and manually for 1% of code on the hot path, but you …

I don't disagree with these principles, but if I wanted to compress all my programming wisdom into 5 rules, I wouldn't spend 3 out of the 5 slots on performance. Performance is jus…

Gah, don't take advice about doing a PhD from the dude who had the best possible academic experience! The vast majority of people who've gone through the PhD grinder have had radic…

The business plan makes sense to me. They are a company that is focussed specifically on building AI data centers, which is a huge part of the economy at the moment. The big cloud …

Interesting historical anecdote: the Swiss became the world's best watchmakers because, in Protestant Geneva under the leadership of John Calvin, jewelry was banned as ostentation.…

It's a bad idea to phrase advice as "Don't Do X", for most values of X that are often undertaken: - Don't move to Detroit - Don't go into academia - Don't use dating apps - Don't b…