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patrickcollison.com

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Re: Questions

#381

Post by StanislavPetrov »

bachbach wrote: post #72
joefreeman wrote: post #22

> Why are certain things getting so much more expensive? I recently read Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and suspect the answer lies in there. The examples Patrick lists are all service industries driven by labour costs. This probably influences the following two questions too (project delays and GDP).

In the construction industry there are no bullshit jobs. Zero. However only 50% of the house price comes from the construction industry, I have another comment suggesting part of why here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18040633

I'm not sure what aspect of construction you are in, but there is an amazing amount of inefficiency. For example, a friend of mine was working on the Tappan Zee bridge project several years ago. Union job, very good salary, benefits. He was working the night shift, making an added bonus night differential. However, there was a noise regulation in place where no work could be done after a certain hour, so for 6 hours a night this extremely well paid union construction crew was sitting around collecting very good money + night differential for doing absolutely nothing. Now his job is very real, and it requires skill, but for the purposes of argument, this was a "bullshit job" that went on for weeks and weeks and added literally millions of dollars to the cost of the job in which absolutely no work was done.

Re: Questions

#382

Post by unhingingdog »

Mizza wrote: post #224
personlurking wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is 1000wpm: https://youtu.be/7i9fZvWyLfI?t=1m41s I wouldn't recall a thing at this speed, nor at 600 which is shown just prior to the time stamp above.

A few things here: This is a poor implementation of RSVP, as each word is being presented at the same speed. Longer words should be given longer presentation times, as should words with punctuation marks. The presentation of the words is also centered rather than aligned, which requires a saccade for each word, which defeats the whole point. It's also a difficult text to start out with, with no context. Even still, I…

I made a similar app (iOS) which varies the display time by word length, punctuation, and each word's place in a list of the 100 most common words (under the assumption that common words contain less information, thus take less effort to read). To be honest, I'm not sure it works any better than one running at a constant speed. There seems to be a surprising lack of research in this area.

(https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zipf/id1366685837?mt=8 if you're interested.)

Re: Questions

#383

Post by quickthrower2 »

jonex wrote: post #195
quickthrower2 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember when I was 18, back in 1998, installing a specially licensed copy of this thing called "Visual C++" and doing just that, i.e the thing they call 'debugging'.

As I understand his point, it's about not having to pause the program. This seems like actually a quite useful feature, and probably not that hard to implement in say, visual studio (possibly requiring a manual trigger for efficiency). So the question is, why has it not happened in 20 years. Why are debuggers at basically the same level of sophistication as 20 years ago, when there's seemingly a lot of low hanging fr…

With VS and .NET you can pause the program, inspect variables, change variables, execute arbitrary code using a REPL, change threads, view memory usage, edit code and continue the program (if properly configured), debug into framework libraries and even third party libraries with a bit of hackery. You used to be able to debug JS - not sure if you can still do this as I haven't tried for ages since the Chrome debugger is pretty good.

You can also use the same tools to debug a crash dump although often a lot of info is lost, but it can be useful.

Admittedly nothing much has changed in years and it would be good to see more.

One thing I would like to see is a time travelling debugger akin to what is provided with Elm, but Elm apps have state concentrated in one place so it is easier to implement there than for a .NET program probably.

Outside of .NET I am not sure of the quality of debugging tools. Jetbrains created something pretty good for Ruby which I used once, it was quite nice. But I am sure there are languages without much support and it would be frustrating to use them.

Haskell is an interesting example because you don't often need to debug, because of the purity you would more likely run additional unit tests / property-based tests on the functions to find the problem. Having said that I've only made small Haskell apps, nothing in the day job.

Re: Questions

#384

Post by StanislavPetrov »

bachbach wrote: post #68

There needs to be a club of people focusing on these sorts of questions consistently. There are only so many Gwerns and Scott Alexanders and Dredmorbiuses out there. There really are not that many people out there thinking about and discussing the Big Ideas and you keep running into the same ones over time. I fear many club members are lost in the blogosphere and near impossible to find with Google. Some possible ans…

> Why is US GDP growth so weirdly constant?

Its not hard to make something look consistent when you are constantly changing the algorithm you use, and substantial changes are made every few years. Comparing GDP from year to year when different formulas were used to calculate it (even if the underlying data was all accurate) is comparing apples and oranges. For example, a 2013 change in the GDP formula gave an instant 3% boost to GDP.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/1368001-u-s-governments-new...

Re: Questions

#385

Post by golemiprague »

unixhero wrote: post #47
chucky wrote: post #35

> Why are there so many successful startups in Stockholm? Several reasons. First, you need to recognize that any Sweden-based startup will, when it gets to be known internationally, have a Stockholm-based office. So it's not about a city of 1 million inhabitants, it's a country of 10 million that's the true number here. As an example, I believe Spotify opened their original offices in both Stockholm and Göteborg more…

Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads of…

I don't know, Israel has a pretty good start up scene for its size and it is sunnier than Australia

Re: Questions

#386

Post by taneq »

novaRom wrote: post #370
petra wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an Israeli and it comes from a few factors: 1. Israelis basically have no choice. If you want to make a good income, working hard in a technology startup(we have very few big tech companies) is one of the very few good options. 2. The army: at a very young age,a decent percentage of Israelis who join the army lead, in high value, high risk situations. That creates a sense of responsibility and strong ambition at…

>> and possibly higher intelligence I heard that a lot of times from mostly uneducated people. All nations have equal level of intelligence. The difference might be access to education, environment, common wealth, and social inequality.

This seems like a dogmatic response rather than a reasoned one. All other aspects of human beings vary by region to some degree, why would intellectual be an exception?

Re: Questions

#387

Post by asksol »

chucky wrote: post #42
drakonka wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I previously read someone's take on this in relation to people feeling secure enough to take risks here (not just in Stockholm but Sweden as a whole I guess). While notch's success may be an outlier, the process of trying to do your own thing isn't here. I'm not sure when in his development Notch left King, but in general there are quite a few people here who just try to go their own way (sometimes completely outside…

Definitely, having a social safety net that allows for moving on from failures is probably a huge factor.

But that safety net doesn't extend to startup founders does it? AFAIR In Norway, you need to have worked in a company as a regular employee for at least one or two years before you can claim unemployment benefits. Health insurance is always there, and so is basic social benefits (but the unemployment one is the only you can live on).

Re: Questions

#388

Post by eigenloss »

adventured wrote: post #94
coldtea wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dont know about others but isnt Zuckerberg donating majority of the wealth? As an "I control everything anyway", tax evasion scheme. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/04/business/dealbook/how-mar... https://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2015/12/03/is-the-new-zucker...

You're flat out wrong in your premise that it's a tax dodge, and it's very easy to demonstrate. Neither of those links support a claim about tax evasion in any regard. There's no special tax benefit to what they set up. There are only structural benefits, in that the LLC can give to political campaigns and make private investments (neither of which are tax deductible). It also enables Zuckerberg to continue to direct…

This absolutely has to be Mark Zuckerberg. Nobody else could get this mad.

The dishonesty is in the description of the event by Zuckerberg and the media. It was covered as "Zuckerberg donates $45 billion to charity," but he effectively donated it to himself.

Re: Questions

#389

Post by hueving »

jjeaff wrote: post #294
unixhero wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good observations! You forgot one major thing. This goes for all of Finland, Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The winter is horribly dark and boring. (Unless you're super rich). Therefore most turn inwards, staying indoors, thinking deeply at problems, spending endless afternoons and nights on things. Be it software development, game development, car tuning, car engine work, engineering, knitting or just reading loads of…

The other major thing (and I would argue more important than the others) is Sweden's wealth and social safety net. Wealth is one of the most important factors for someone to found a startup. You aren't going out and starting a company if you have to work 80 plus hours a week to live. Just look at the clueless opinions of so many tech founders about how "you shouldn't pay yourself a salary at first after you take inve…

The point is that you shouldn't take a regular market salary. Software people can live on way less than what the market currently offers so if you pay yourself the competitive rate you're burning a lot of your runway pointlessly.

Re: Questions

#390

Post by curun1r »

jim777 wrote: post #237
notdang wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>and possibly higher intelligence Interesting what would happen if this is said about any other country

It's not about nationality: Ashkenazi Jews in general -- Israeli or not -- tend to be smarter. ~20% of Nobel prize winners are Jews compared to less than 1% of the global population. So either there's a Jewish conspiracy (which some people believe...) or Jews tend to be smarter. Some people would say that this is cultural. I doubt it -- I think it's genetic. Intelligence is a physical attribute determined by genes, j…

> So either there's a Jewish conspiracy (which some people believe...) or Jews tend to be smarter.

You're assuming that intelligence is the determining factor in winning a Nobel prize, which seems spurious at best. Work ethic and training, particularly early in life seem, to me, like they'd be better predictors. I'd posit that Jewish culture is better at nurturing intelligence before I'd conclude that there's some ethnic superiority going on.

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