Viewing profile — mdnahas

I host a parallel translation of the original book on Peano’s Axioms. If you have comments on either the Latin or English translation, they’d be very welcome! (My 2 years of high s…

As someone with an Italian grandmother and both a CS and Econ degree, I got a great laugh out of this joke! Bravo!

Not in dr_scully’s reply is that his thesis says haemoglobin is not static. Blood flow to the skin can vary over time.

A German woman told me about her trip to Ireland: She tried to buy a bus ticket from the driver, like she did at home. But, in Ireland, you have to buy it at the station. The drive…

My worry is learning and innovation. When companies sold physical devices, other companies could learn from them and improve them. We invented patents to provide economic support f…

Economist here. There are 3 parties and I’d focus on the investor’s perspective. The investor gives money to the intermediary company that signs a contract with the using company. …

Economist and former trader here. I did a quick skim and this market is badly structured. According to Claude, the method use to compute the prices for large sales is based on expe…

My definition of a cult is a group where members don’t trust people outside the group. We have a lot of news sources saying that we should not trust other news sources. Especially …

I read “Enlightenment Now” and it is full of beautiful graphs of quality of life over time improving. More GDP, less hunger, longer life spans. There was one odd graph. It showed t…

My father designed processors. He says all electronics are analog. Some just pretends to act digital.

Another suggestion: update an estimate of words known after every word. E.g. start out with a range of 0 to 170,000. Then after the first word, show 100 to 170,000. Etc. Users get …

My father worked at Bell Labs. He said the rules of the monopoly signed with the US govt drove innovation. AT&T, which operated Bell Labs, could charge cost plus a fixed percentage…

I live in Austin and, in 2018, I could go west and pass through 4 districts in a few miles. My own one you would exit and re-enter and exit again! I actually made jigsaw puzzles to…

I have warm memories of splitting wood at my uncle’s with a sledge hammer and wedge. It is that right mix of physical activity (but not too much) and a little brain work. Great to …

I am interested in your opinion of Southwest Airlines. It had a very specific culture and acted differently than most USA-based airlines. But it was recently bought and changed to …

To be pedantic, the S&P 500 is a large portion of the stock market, not the economy. Its value is about 75% of the value in stocks. But stocks are only 25% of all stores value. Rea…

Vanguard’s VTI uses an index designed by CRSP. I read the rules and, best I can tell, CRSP indices will add the stocks at the next rebalancing in September. (FWIW, CRSP was run by …

Vanguard doesn’t use S&P, because they wanted low fees and the license was expensive. They use CRSP’s index rules. I checked and it looks like new stocks get added to the CRSP inde…

I tried to send an SD card loaded with free data (Wikipedia, dictionaries, books, etc.) to a refugee camp in Bangladesh that had no good internet connection. Tried twice with USPS.…

Legal Eagle does legal analysis on YouTube. They looked at the recent “settlement” between Trump and the IRS. They determined that it is not legal, is not limited to $1.776 (as a p…

Right, you should use Lean or Coq. They are cleaner mathematically, which means AI has a better chance with them. And you can have the AI write proofs about their correctness. The …

We created databases to keep track of reality. It fascinates me when the database is taken for reality.

Should YC HackerNews put together an offer to buy GitHub from Microsoft?

One throughline of history is database-ization. Some of our older writings are records of ownership and tax liabilities. We keep moving information from the real world into a datab…